Higher Logic has terminated open source Vanilla
On 2 Dec 2024, I received this message from Higher Logic's Director of Software Engineering:
[…]
I am writing to inform you of an important decision regarding the open source offering of Vanilla Forums. After careful consideration, we have decided to deprecate continued support for the open source version of Vanilla Forums. This decision has not been made lightly, but due to resource allocation constraints and our current development focus, we believe it is the right time to make this change official.
Effective January 1st, 2025, we will stop updating the open source version of Vanilla. However, we will continue to host the open.vanillaforums.com website and maintain the open source solution on GitHub so that the community has access to the solution in its current iteration. While we will no longer contribute to it, we welcome and encourage the open source community to continue making additions and improvements. We believe it remains a strong and valuable free solution.
I will be making a formal announcement to the rest of the community at the end of this week. […]
While I replied to this email, I received no response, and no such notice was posted here in December or since. Therefore, I am sharing the news myself since 4 months have elapsed.
This notice supplants my notice last year that official releases had ended. Sometime since then, Higher Logic removed the Addon directory without notice.
I strongly object to Higher Logic's choice to not continue security releases for a transition period. I therefore strongly recommend migrating to another forum software, like Flarum, immediately. Your forum will eventually become compromised without ongoing security updates.
Last year, I appeared on the Community Signal podcast and the title of our episode was When Open Source Community Software is Bought By Private Equity.
I have now disabled new user registrations on this forum, but have enabled existing members to invite users if they want (assuming that feature still works). Unfortunately, I expect spam would start to overtake the site as the moderators have largely abandoned the site and I only check in periodically, so I regard this as a necessity.
Good luck out there, and keep building communities.
Comments
Really sad but I think we all saw it coming to an end.
Good luck too 😊
Hi @Linc, I regret that there has been some misunderstanding in our communications. As mentioned previously, Higher Logic is currently evaluating our approach to our Open Source offerings, but despite the initial target of January 1st for a decision no final decisions have been made yet, which is why I have not responded to your email regarding further adjustments we could make for long term support of the Open Source solution. Our goal is to find the best way to support this offering and community while aligning with our resources and overall strategy for Vanilla Cloud.
As outlined in my previous email, should any decisions be made, I will personally communicate them to this community, providing detailed reasoning and further information on how Higher Logic plans to continue supporting this community. At present, Higher Logic has not discontinued support for the Open Source version of Vanilla. However, our recent upgrade to PHP version 8.1+ has posed significant challenges with legacy code relied upon by the Open Source version, impacting our ability to maintain add-ons and push additional update to the solution this year.
We will share more updates as they become available.
My quote was accurate, my post was strictly factual, and this was the second post by a HL employee in three years. I'm not here to make you look bad nor am I upset or making a point, I'm simply doing chores out of a likely-misguided sense of accountability. Folks who trusted us deserve clear communication to make good decisions going forward. That's the whole story. Syncing un-built code to GitHub does little, if anything, to improve their security or make their situation more sustainable. We both know no investment is coming or warranted — there's no chance it's remotely aligned with your GTM plans or goals, and it would be herculean to resuscitate in a meaningful way. Neither of us have anything to gain here. It's time to let it go.