inter forum

An Update on Vanilla Open Source
SystemSystem Admin December 2025
Hi everyone,

Vanilla has gone through quite a journey over the years, and the open source community has been at the heart of that story from the beginning. Many of you have contributed code, shared ideas, reported bugs, written plugins, and helped each other learn. You’ve shaped what Vanilla is today, and we’re deeply grateful for that.

As many of you have already noticed, the level of active support and maintenance for the Vanilla open source solution has gradually declined to the point where it really doesn't exist. After a lot of consideration, Higher Logic has made the decision that the OSS version of Vanilla will no longer be part of the long-term vision for our community forum platform.

Here’s what that means going forward:

We will discontinue ongoing development and support of the Vanilla open source solution.
Higher Logic will no longer be contributing new features, fixes, or updates to the OSS codebase.
The OSS codebase will remain available on GitHub.
We know many of you still rely on and care about this software. While we won’t be actively maintaining it, we will continue to host the repository so the community can reference, fork, and build upon it.
This forum will be closed in the new year.
We want to give everyone time to wrap up discussions, export anything important, and make any transitions you need to make. We’ll share more specific timing and any practical details as we get closer.
We know this news will be disappointing for many of you. It’s disappointing for us too, because we recognize how much passion, time, and care you’ve invested here. Vanilla’s open source roots, and the people who believed in it early on, are a huge part of why it ever became a successful platform.

On behalf of everyone at Higher Logic and the original Vanilla team: Thank you.
Thank you for your pull requests, your bug reports, your plugins and themes, your feedback (the tough love included), and your dedication over the years. It has truly meant a lot.

If you have questions about this transition, please feel free to ask in the comments below. We’ll do our best to answer what we can.

With appreciation,
The Higher Logic Vanilla Team