Whois & Analysis for vanillaforums.com

Vanilla is a lightweight Internet forum package written in the PHP scripting language using the Garden framework.

The software is released under the GNU GPL.

Vanilla Forums is free software, standards-compliant, customizable discussion forums.

Since 2009 there is also a cloud-hosted version (offered by Vanilla).

A virtual community is a social network of individuals who interact through specific social media, potentially crossing geographical and political boundaries in order to pursue mutual interests or goals.

Some of the most pervasive virtual communities are online communities operating under social networking services.

In sales, commerce and economics, a customer (sometimes known as a , buyer, or purchaser) is the recipient of a good, service, product or an idea - obtained from a seller, vendor, or supplier via a financial transaction or exchange for money or some other valuable consideration.

An ultimate etymology of "client" may imply someone merely to do business, whereas a purchaser procures goods or services on occasion but a customer customarily or habitually engages in transactions (historically: the collection of tolls or taxes - see ).

Such distinctions have no contemporary semantic weight.

Feedback occurs when outputs of a system are routed back as inputs as part of a chain of cause-and-effect that forms a circuit or loop.

The system can then be said to feed back into itself.

The notion of cause-and-effect has to be handled carefully when applied to feedback systems:

In production, research, retail, and accounting, a cost is the value of money that has been used up to produce something, and hence is not available for use anymore.

In business, the cost may be one of acquisition, in which case the amount of money expended to acquire it is counted as cost.

In this case, money is the input that is gone in order to acquire the thing.

This acquisition cost may be the sum of the cost of production as incurred by the original producer, and further costs of transaction as incurred by the acquirer over and above the price paid to the producer.

Usually, the price also includes a mark-up for profit over the cost of production.