Agency/docs/sites/platforms/vanilla.md
Ryan Schultz 107220aa9a docs: split site docs into platform + site layers; add changelog entries
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-05-11 16:01:05 -05:00

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Platform: Vanilla Forums

Vanilla Forums is an open source discussion platform. It exposes a REST API at /api/v2. Authentication requirements vary by installation — some endpoints are publicly accessible, others require an API key.


Available signals

  • Post count per user
  • Topics created per user
  • Likes/reactions received per user (quality signal — peers valued the content)

Note on built-in gamification: Vanilla provides a badges and points system. This is intentionally not used as a collection signal — it is opaque, outside community control, and subject to change without notice. Prefer collecting raw signals and owning the weighting transparently in config.yaml.


How to collect

Vanilla REST API (/api/v2).

Example endpoints:

  • /api/v2/users — user list
  • /api/v2/users/{id} — user profile including post count
  • /api/v2/discussions — discussions with reaction counts

Authentication: Verify which endpoints are publicly accessible on a given installation before building a collector.


General concerns

  • API authentication requirements vary per installation
  • Post count is a blunt signal; likes received partially compensates
  • Username mapping to other platforms requires manual or heuristic matching