Welcome to awesome!

There's nothing sweeter than a fresh new forum, ready to welcome your community. A Vanilla Forum has all the bits and pieces you need to build an awesome discussion platform customized to your needs.

Here are a few tips for you as the administrator:

• Use the Getting Started checklist in the Dashboard to get your site ready for visitors.
• Don't create too many categories. We recommend 3-8 to start with, keep it simple for your users!
• Announce a discussion (click the gear) to stick to the top of the list, and Close it to stop further comments. This is useful for posting the rules, or welcoming new members.
• Use Sink to take attention away from a discussion that might be getting out of hand. New comments will no longer bring it back to the top of the list.
• Bookmark a discussion (click the star) to get notifications for new comments. You can edit notification settings from your profile.

We've created a few sample discussions to help get you started. They contain some useful "Day 1" information and also show you how things might look once your forum has a bit of real activity. Feel free to keep, edit, or delete them as you see fit!

Now spread the word to get this place cooking. Cheers!