I randomly decided to try a search for other Vanilla Forums to see what they had done with it. How they'd styled it and such like.. So I worked out what was the common feature to search for, and I got this simple little Google Search. Here's a few I found:
well I'll be damned, there's quite a number of forums that have either just switched or popped up. Vanilla is going global fast! Out of the quick 3 pages I've searched through, I've noticed that they're all still using pretty much the default vanilla theme or they've hacked apart stuarts 36 degrees theme for their own use. Crazy.
Good to see my theme out there, no-one ever bloody emails me to let me know they're using it though! but I'm so thorough with my referrers I have a list of loads, some of those above, and a few others which are members only.
Hehe, stuart, don't count on receiving emails all the time. As much as I'd love to know who's using my themes I realize I'm not going to find out most of the time so it doesn't phase me in the slightest. I'll just be happy knowing they're out there somewhere.
It may seem VERY active because of the amount of discussions, but most of them are very old. The board's been around for almost 5 years now and I managed to port most of the old discussions over after installing Vanilla right when 0.9.2 came out. Took some trial and error, but it was good to flex my SQL skills (or lack thereof) for a bit. The old board software was my own home-brew, so luckily the two schemas were similar.
I find it shocking how few of the people who install vanilla come back to say hi or thanks or anything. There have been well over 8000 downloads of Vanilla at this point, and there are less than 1000 members on this community. That's just wierd, imho.
I think a lot of people just have a quick look, remove their test installation and forget all about it. For others, the language barrier may be a reason. I have seen vanilla sites in my referrers which are translated into Japanese and Danish to name just two. Still, feedback is great for development.
Mark, the numbers you're seeing though are fairly good. Consider yourself lucky to see at least 2% of those people downloading activly participating in development. Like stuart said, it's most likely the language barrier that is persistant in all applications, so I'm sure while there's people from other countries downloading, I'll place a safe bet that the only thing keeping them from posting here is their language skills.
Of the 800 some odd users here though, how many of them have been active in the past month?