@CyanPrime not sure how that's fixed it as your route inside theme.less doesn't actually point to the vanilla template. For that file to point at vanilla, you'd be looking at ../../../nodebb-theme-vanilla, but if it works then, so be it.
You would need to make a plugin to listen for a socket event, and in the widget js send the needed data to verify the request server-side. After adjusting the reputation and sending the new rep back, you probably want to make a db key to record the last action taken, such as how core uses pid:x:upvote
