Forum Software Reviews

Pros:

• simple to set up and use
• looks good and intuitive

Cons:

• small bugs when disbling certain features (categories)
• NO pre-moderation feature! (see summary)

Summary:
Vanilla Forums was mostly agreeable with me, besides a bug or two. But then I ran into a brick wall. Users can only be granted the privilege to post new discussions or not, and/or post comments or not ... and if they can post, the post goes live. Moderators can then delete or do a number of things with the post. But a setting that requires new posts to get approved by a moderator before going live is pretty standard for forum software. I can't believe Vanilla Forums does not provide it.
Vanilla says that they excluded this feature because the essence of the software is to provide a simple forum platform, and that is a feature that most users do not need. Well, there are a great number of users clamoring for this feature on the Vanilla Forums website forums. The way Vanilla is built also makes it very hard (perhaps impossible) to create a plugin that adds moderation functionality. There is a plugin that (supposedly) does it, but it could not do it with only the API and had to tweak system files. Alas, it still is not an answer to this missing feature --- it has not been updated since 2007 and is only compatible with Vanilla 1.