8 MIN READ 26.5 transforms how members discover content and how community managers curate it. Members can now search across external knowledge bases (Confluence, internal wikis, any connected source) and read results without ever leaving the community. Community managers can place editorial content banners on any page to spotlight campaigns, launches, or key articles, schedule Orchestrator rules to run on a recurring cadence, and see exactly how their automations are performing with full execution history. The release also delivers accessibility improvements and a broad batch of reliability fixes across the social feed, email templates, moderation, and the Salesforce connector.
New Features (Aurora Early Access)
Availability: All Early Access features are behind feature flags and must be manually enabled. Contact your Customer Success Manager to begin. Once enabled, features are fully configurable from the admin panel.
Note: Through the end of 2026, we are offering our migration services at no cost for Classic users who move to Aurora AI. Contact your CSM for details
Federated Search
Members can now search across your connected external knowledge bases directly from the community search bar, and read the results without leaving. Admins connect and configure sources entirely through a self-service admin console, with no developer involvement, no integration projects, and no code.
Connect external knowledge sources (Confluence spaces, or any REST API through the Direct API connector) from a five-tab admin console.
Scope each source to the entire community or to specific boards, with per-board defaults you can apply in bulk.
Stage a new source in Review, check real results in Preview, then go Live. Sources move cleanly between Live, Not Live and Archived.
External results appear in their own labelled band on the search page, clearly separated from community content. Members can read a result inline or open it on the source site.
Duplicate results pointing at the same external page are collapsed into one.
A consent gate withholds external results from members in cookie-banner regions until they accept.
Members only see external content they are entitled to; permissions are re-checked per viewer and snippets are sanitised before display.
A Health dashboard tracks each source's status, response time, and failure streak,
Coming next: Answer Assist will draw on federated sources when generating answers, and video results will play inline within community search results. Enablement: Federated Search is off by default. Contact your CSM to enable it.
Carousels: Featured Content Banners
Community managers can now place editorial content banners (similar to the featured sections on streaming or e-commerce platforms) on any community page to spotlight campaigns, product launches, events, or key articles, and guide members to what matters most. Add a carousel to any Community Home, Category Home, or Board Home page from Page Designer (Add Section → Carousel). Each carousel is a full-width hero banner section with one or more slides.
What goes in a slide:
Upload an image (JPEG, PNG, or animated GIF up to 5 MB), paste an image URL, or pick a published blog post; the blog's cover image, title, and URL are pulled in automatically.
Add a heading and sub text to overlay on the image.
Add up to two CTA buttons with custom labels and destination URLs, linking to a blog post, KB article, event, campaign page, or any external URL.
Choose a hero variant:
Full Image: edge-to-edge background image with text overlay
Split Media: image on one side, text on the other
Centered Text: text-focused with image as subtle background
Compact: reduced-height banner for tighter page layouts
Person Image: designed for expert spotlights or contributor features
Peek: adjacent slides are partially visible on both sides, signalling more content to explore
Configure behavior:
Auto-scroll with a configurable interval (1–30 seconds). Rotation pauses on hover and keyboard focus, and turns off for members who have asked their device to reduce motion.
Toggle navigation dots, prev/next arrows, and swipe on mobile independently. At least one navigation method must be enabled.
Add a banner badge (e.g. "New", "Featured", "Live Now") for visual emphasis.
Customize the overlay style: solid colour or gradient with adjustable opacity and colours.
For members: Carousels surface editorially curated content (featured articles, product launches, upcoming events, expert spotlights) right where members browse, making discovery effortless and the homepage intentional rather than purely algorithmic. Slides linking to restricted content are automatically hidden from members without access. Enablement: Carousels are off by default. Contact your CSM to enable them. Note: Horizontal content rail carousels (scrolling card rows), dynamic content sourcing from boards, audience targeting, and carousel analytics are planned for a future release.
Aurora
Enhancements Orchestrator: Scheduled Rules
Orchestrator gains a new trigger type: rules can now run on a recurring schedule (daily, weekly, or monthly) at a chosen time and time zone, instead of only firing in response to a member action.
Define who the rule reaches using the condition builder with new audience conditions exclusive to scheduled rules: Rank, Registration Date, Last Visit Date, Kudos Received, Kudos Given, and Roles.
Send each matched member a templated email or private message.
Scheduled runs appear in Run Logs alongside event-driven runs with the same level of execution detail.
Orchestrator: Run Logs
Community managers currently have to file a support request or ask an engineer every time they suspect an automation isn't firing. Run Logs gives them direct, self-service visibility into how every Orchestrator rule is performing: what ran, what didn't, and why.
Summary view shows daily activity trends and success rates at a glance. Detailed view lists every individual execution with outcome, trigger, action, duration, and error message.
Outcomes are clearly distinguished: success, failure, skipped (conditions didn't match), and stopped (blocked by a pre-action check).
Filter by date range, outcome, trigger type and action type; search by rule name.
Orchestrator: Other Enhancements
Search now matches on trigger name as well as rule name.
URL validation added to the Send Private Message link field.
The Send Email action is now correctly gated to triggers configured with the Immediately cadence.
Accessibility (WCAG 2.2 AA)
Clearer control names: action menus, kudos buttons and the solved badge now expose proper accessible names; invalid or misleading labels removed.
Keyboard and hover UX: focused fields stay visible beneath the sticky navigation bar; hover cards can be dismissed with Escape so keyboard users are never stuck.
Status announcements: search result counts, moderation banners and toast messages are correctly announced to assistive technology without triggering as false page headings.
Images, embeds and zoom: preview images and video thumbnails carry correct alt handling; embedded iframes are titled; Zoom meeting pages can be enlarged with browser zoom again.
Answer Assist & CLM
Full citation details (title, snippet and source URL) now shown in Admin Review Mode for answer quality evaluation.
AI processing status now correctly shows "AI: Disabled" or "AI: Skipped" instead of a false "Pending" on boards where AI moderation is off.
Expert Routing renamed to Answer Requests throughout the UI, across all 28 supported locales.
Answer Confidence Threshold simplified to three options: Moderate (Recommended), High and Extreme.
Clarification question answers now processed through the same AI moderation pipeline as regular posts.
Fixed Answer Assist generating duplicate replies when a post is edited mid-generation.
Email Templates
Fixed email template links losing their href when a variable includes a UTM suffix.
Community URLs are now available in the link popover within the email editor.
Fixed digest editor issues: layout rendering, preview display, variable substitution, and save/publish behaviour.
Fixed Undo incorrectly clearing original text when reverting a block duplication or close action.
A fallback message is now required before a digest template can be saved or published.
Fixed the editor showing a success confirmation without actually saving; errors now surface correctly.
Notifications & Email Preferences
Members can now control rank-change email notifications from their personal notification settings.
Post notification controls consolidated to a single Follow / Unfollow action per thread.
Bug Fixes Social Feed & Reactions
Fixed social feed save error, incorrect view count display, and reaction picker UI being clipped.
View counts are now de-duplicated server-side; reopening the same post no longer double-counts.
Moderation
Fixed moderation badge incorrectly showing "In Review" on publicly visible posts in Selective (post-moderation) boards; the badge now correctly checks whether the post is actually non-public before displaying a moderation state.
Fixed moderation badge and banner showing a stale "In Review" state instead of "Not Accepted" after a spam rejection until a full page refresh.
Spam and Other reject reasons restored for replies in threaded view.
Fixed a rendering crash on the Manage Content Drafts and Spam tabs.
Quick Poll content now graded by Akismet for communities using Akismet without AI moderation.
Fixed adding a poll image incorrectly stripping the main post's featured image on publish.
Cross-Board Posting
Fixed the board destination picker returning no results when searching by exact board name.
Fixed destination picker label display and expansion behaviour.
Fixed signed-out users landing on a broken /create URL instead of being redirected to sign-in.
Salesforce Connector
Fixed the Salesforce settings page logging a GraphQL resolution error on every load, which could cause node pickers to silently omit nodes.
Custom user-sync field mappings are now validated at save time with a clear message describing what's wrong, instead of failing silently.
Sensitive member fields such as passwords and stored credentials can no longer be included in a custom sync mapping.
Admin-configured field names and query fragments used by the Salesforce connector are now validated and escaped, preventing malformed or crafted values from altering queries sent to Salesforce.
Classic
The following fixes are specific to Classic in 26.5.
Moderation & Spam
Improved spam detection by passing new-account reputation signals to the spam-detection provider.
Fixed Akismet spam-feedback reports sending the moderator's device information instead of the original author's.
Fixed moderation actions taken by an automated system process being recorded under the post author's name.
Excluded internal abuse-report notifications from community content and search results.
Notifications & Email
Fixed subscription emails not being sent for board notifications despite eligible settings.
Fixed the Notification Feed count dropping without any change in read status.
Fixed topic links in notification emails pointing to the wrong page, especially after a move.
Fixed Studio's Send Email to Self failing for the Event Board notification template.
Content & Profiles
Fixed article contributors being removed by unrelated edits.
Fixed root post submissions being rejected as missing a required label on boards using hierarchical labels.
Fixed spell-check returning an error for French and Spanish editor text.
Fixed profile post counts including archived and deleted content.
Fixed the Top Solution Authors widget rendering empty on board pages.
Fixed anonymous visitors seeing a generic error instead of a sign-in prompt on profile pages.
Search & API
Fixed board listings returning nothing when an unsupported board style was present.
Fixed the REST API album search filter for the default album style being silently ignored.
Fixed custom field values not being returned by the API after they were saved on a topic.
Added membership-type and post-time filters to Group Hub and message queries, and fixed a related page crash.
Prevented deep pagination requests from generating oversized search queries.
Analytics & Reporting
Fixed Community Analytics failing to load for a community's root category.
Improved analytics reporting for AI moderation decisions and bans.
Fixed the Admin Metrics User Reports CSV export failing for very large user populations.
Performance & Stability
Fixed shared caches staying empty after a deployment triggered a large invalidation burst.
Fixed a request-limiting pool that could get stuck rejecting all requests.
Added automatic recovery for failed customization-cache updates that could otherwise show raw navigation keys or default branding.
Fixed server errors returned for malformed avatar and action URLs requested by web crawlers.
Fixed Case Portal failing when its required support board was never created.
Security
Closed workflow gaps that allowed authors to publish blog and knowledge base articles without required approval.
Hardened handling of malformed image URLs that could return a server error.
Rollout Schedule
Stage Rollout: September 8–9, 2026
Testing window: Sep 8 through Sep 21, 2026
Production Rollout: September 23–24, 2026
The rollout will follow the standard maintenance windows.
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