PlushForums Celebrates One Year on the Market With Slew of Updates

Last year, I published a review of PlushForums, a tastefully repackaged and remarketed commercial fork of Vanilla Forums.

The forum platform has been on the market for over a year now, having been founded by the London-based Adrian Flitcroft back in 2014. Today, PlushForums remains geared towards startups and small businesses, despite boasting clients as big as Penn State University and Google.

Recently, to celebrate a year on the market, the platform received an update. Let's have a look at what's new.

Mailchimp & Question Mode

First up, PlushForums now integrates with Mailchimp. It's an automated two-way sync, with no management required.

Members can unsubscribe and re-subscribe to newsletters via their profile, while unsubscriptions from MailChimp are synchronized back to the user's forum.

As for Question Mode, this new feature enables forum members to ask questions, for anybody to come along and answer. It's a feature designed for customer service delivery and knowledge base creation, as definitive answers can be identified and marked as such.

Localization & More

Localization is another enhancement.

PlushForums now works in any language, and can now host forums in the US, UK, France, Germany, Netherlands, Japan and Australia, for customers who have legal compliance issues with US hosts. DDoS protection is also now available as an optional extra.

MathJax is another new integration option, which is a nod in the direction of educational institutes. Mobile users can upload and insert images in one tap, new styling options come into play, and content flagging makes forums easier to moderate.

It's always good to see budding platforms doing well, and PlushForums seems to be doing just that. Their first year looks to have been a good one – and I'll be keeping close tabs on their second.

To find out more about these updates, check out the PlushForums blog.