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A few years ago I created a web site called the Chronicles of George, featuring some badly-written help desk tickets from the job I had at the time. It gained me some small amount of Internet fame (but no fortune), and developed a loyal community of sympathizers. For a long time we hung out on a self-hosted phpbb forum, but a change in web hosting led to the opportunity to also change the forum software away from something as hack-prone and complex as phpbb to something faster, simpler, and ostensibly more secure: Vanilla.
Out of the box, Vanilla operates a bit differently from a traditional thread-based forum like phpbb. It is a discussion-focused forum, deprioritizing standard categorical organization in favor of bringing the things being talked about to the forefront. This has advantages in some forum models, like a support forum for a specific product or service, where the first thing a reader wants to see is discussion, not a choice of categories, but it’s not necessarily what most folks are used to seeing out of a web forum. Fortunately, Vanilla also offers configuration options to make it behave more like a “standard” web forum.
Why choose it, then, if we’re just going to override its most distinguishing characteristic? Because, as mentioned in the opening paragraph, it’s light and fast and secure. Additionally, the 2.1 branch (currently under development and downloadable here) comes with an absolutely killer theme that we can easily customize and prettify with some quick CSS.
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