Best Of

There's nothing sweeter than a fresh new forum, ready to welcome your community. A Vanilla Forum has all the bits and pieces you need to build an awesome discussion platform customized to your needs.

Here are a few tips for you as the administrator:

• Use the Getting Started checklist in the Dashboard to get your site ready for visitors.
• Don't create too many categories. We recommend 3-8 to start with, keep it simple for your users!
• Announce a discussion (click the gear) to stick to the top of the list, and Close it to stop further comments. This is useful for posting the rules, or welcoming new members.
• Use Sink to take attention away from a discussion that might be getting out of hand. New comments will no longer bring it back to the top of the list.
• Bookmark a discussion (click the star) to get notifications for new comments. You can edit notification settings from your profile.

We've created a few sample discussions to help get you started. They contain some useful "Day 1" information and also show you how things might look once your forum has a bit of real activity. Feel free to keep, edit, or delete them as you see fit!

Now spread the word to get this place cooking. Cheers!

This is an example of a 'rules' discussion, laying out expected behaviour for new users who join the community. Customize it to **** your specific needs, or write your own rules completely from scratch!

This community has been created so that you can exchange ideas, converse and meet others who share a common interest.

Here are some guidelines:

• Keep your posts relevant to the forum category.
• Please be respectful of others and don’t sweat the small stuff.
• Please do not post any **** or photos that you wouldn’t want to be seen by the public.
• Do not post hateful or illegal content. Do not post copyrighted material without proper attribution.
• SPAM will not be tolerated.
• Use private messages to chat with moderators or other members in private.

In summary: be polite, enjoy yourself, and help us build a great community.