Best Of
Re: Vanilla version 2021.009 is the latest stable release as of now
I don't believe you'll ever see another pre-built copy of Vanilla distributed by the company. I'd love to be wrong, I just don't see it happening, knowing what I do about internal politics there.
I do expect to continue seeing automated unbuilt "releases" like you see on GitHub currently, because those are serving some of their enterprise customers via the Docker installation.
I'm willing to answer questions for any senior members here that want to build, vet, and update the latest version in the addon directory. Unfortunately I'm not willing to lead that process myself any longer. I kept those releases going by my own force of will for more than 5 years and I'm tapped out.

Re: When is the next Vanilla OSS release?
I've tried it some weeks ago and I do not recall if I had troubles, but i had built it successfully: https://open.vanillaforums.com/discussion/comment/264109#Comment_264109
The instructions on what do are short, but they are here: https://github.com/vanilla/vanilla#building-releases
There certainly is no explanation on how to install composer, phing or any other of those tools. You can find those instructions anywhere in the net. I wouldn't even try to run those tools from a command line in Windows, by the way. If you are stuck with a Windows machine, search the net for WSL, the subsystem for Linux. This will allow you to "install" e.g. debian inside your Windows and run those tools from a Linux command line.

Re: What Addon/Plugin would you like to have so bad?
I have a couple of pretty specific ideas, but I'm not sure how appealing they would be to an average forum. Here they are anyway 😁
Attachment manager for users:
Big believer in users being in control of their own data, so I've added addons that lets users delete their own accounts and download their data, but haven't found an attachment manager that lets users sort out their attachments. I have the Media Manager from Vanillaskins and it's nice for keeping an eye on things, but something that lets users handle it themselves would be pretty neat.
An elegant way to automatically promote members:
We've set it up so that all new members start with very limited permissions to weed out the spam bots filling their profiles with dodgy links. Some kind of automation which promotes people to regular members after certain number of configurable triggers like time registered, posts made or others would be nice. Currently have something implemented in Yaga, but it's not very elegant, nor completely reliable.
Discord integration (or maybe just webhooks in general):
We have a pretty lively Discord community to go along with the forums so would be nice if it was easy to post interesting forum stuff on Discord as well. Vice versa would be neat too, but getting stuff out of Discord is probably a lot harder than getting it in there. There is an addon, but it doesn't work quite as advertised and hasn't had any updates since it was first posted. Would be neat, if you could automate things with IFTTT or Zapier too.
Featured posts:
We're an art forum, so would be nice to have an easy way to click a button on a comment (or discussion) with some excellent artwork and have it appear on the front page with an image and links to the post and whoever made it. Could also keep an archive of featured posts on a separate page. I have prototyped something Yaga based (A feature reaction limited to moderation staff and then scraping the relevant /best/actions/ page) but a dedicated addon could be kinda useful.
An easy way to add new custom embeds (and bbcode):
We're still running bbcode (forum goes back to something like 2001 and used to run vbulletin), so would be nice to to have an easy way to add more tags. On a more generic note, some kind of embed editor with an UI and everything, which lets you hook up an embed code for something like Gfycat, or Sketchfab and just posts it on the forums similar to Youtube or Twitter embeds.
Different styles for different categories:
Kinda art forum specific thing again. Would be nice to be able to set some categories as galleries (for example) and have them show up as Masonry or some other gallery looking layout. There are addons for that, but I think they're all for the entire forum and don't let you set it up for specific category.

Re: Discussion Post Count
Updates are cached, so it is updated in increments.
Saving db writting resources.
Helpfull for larger communities.
Downside on small communities is that there is a delay in update in count.
Yourforum.com/dba/counts can update

Re: Current state of Vanilla OSS?
I don't have experience with Textile conversions, but it looks like Markdown-adjacent, and I've never really had concerns about the processing speed. If you have a Vanilla forum using Markdown, it's doing the HTML processing in real time at pageload. It's pretty darn fast. I don't honestly think it would have a major impact on the migration time.
I don't know enough about Drupal to offer any specifics, but if you know of a way to pre-process and store the rendered HTML on the table in Drupal, that would be a nice way to sidestep the issue regardless of what platform you head to.

Re: Current state of Vanilla OSS?
The existing Drupal 7 package appears to assume discussions & comments are in rendered HTML. Vanilla does have the concept of input formats, and the migration tool does have the concept of filtering data as its being processed. So your options are:
- Do nothing and let the non-TinyMCE posts look like raw Textile.
- Get someone to write a simple Textile parser plugin for Vanilla.
- Get someone to add a simple Textile filter to the Porter.
Personally I'd go with option 3 if you're not super attached to Textile. There's already a PHP library for parsing Textile so I imagine it'd be pretty simple. I may be able to do that as well.

Re: Current state of Vanilla OSS?
I use both Drupal and Vanilla and I don't think they are really comparable. Drupal is much bigger and more complex.
I'd suggest that the underlying issue perhaps is that the social media platforms have absorbed much of the demand for forums so that self-hosted forums and blogs are less common. There are still good reasons to host independently but it means reduced activity, although Vanilla has its own business model via cloud hosted forums which is a good thing from the point of view of open source users.
A lot of plugins are now included in the core software.
Tim
Re: Yaga causes fatal error on disscutions
Never mind found out what the problem was, the "Reaction" plugin was overriding the YAGA plugin, which was crashing the software
Re: Vanilla 2021.012 is now available
There are plans for getting on a more consistent release cadence. I'm hoping to have an announcement on this tomorrow.
Appreciate everyone's patience!

Re: Coding for NSFW images
i use Nudenet for detecting porn image or video
its python script, you need to code it yourself, scan GDN_Media
if found porn, you can delete it or report to you