Vanilla Forums Inc [1]., a provider of hosted community software today released new functionality to make online 
[2]communities more engaging for their users. Vanilla Reactions allows members to quickly share their reactions to content and other members. The reactions can be used to highlight interesting discussions, suppress poor content, automate moderation, and create nuanced member reputation profiles. Vanilla Badges serve to reward community members for positive participation – members are awarded badges for receiving praise from others and for various other forms of participation.
“More than any other platform, community forums allow people to have meaningful social interactions with a broad group of others to create a real community that has its own distinct culture. Unfortunately, many discussion forums still run on software that was created in the 90s and hasn’t evolved much since then,” explained Vanilla Forums co-founder Mark O’Sullivan. “Vanilla provides not only a scalable platform but is making constant investments in new features [3] to ensure that communities can stay strong and engaged. Badges and Reactions allows members to set the tone of the community and helps curate trending content which helps draw in more traffic.”
“Our community kept growing and with that growth came challenges.” Said AllHipHop.com’s CEO Grouchy Greg Watkins. “We needed to reduce the amount of time we were spending on administration and moderation and more importantly we wanted to keep our community a fun and welcoming place for new members. For these reasons, we chose to migrate our forum to the Vanilla Platform.”
Vanilla Badges and Reactions are available on Vanilla Forums’ hosted plans, which start at $49 per month.