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

34 lines
1.2 KiB
Markdown

# 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