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Release Notes & Updates
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14.11 Release Notes

JohnD's avatar
JohnD
Khoros Alumni (Retired)
11 years ago

The 14.11 Release provides lots of enhancements to existing features and offerings. Administrators can now let members to close their community accounts from their personal settings page, empowering members with greater control over the state of their community account. Additionally, admins can remove a member’s account directly from Community Admin without having to go through Lithium Support.

Community admins can now give community members access to upload Closed Caption files for any video they have uploaded to the community.

LSI now includes new response rate metrics (First Reply < 24 Hours, First Reply > 24 Hours, and Total Number of First Replies) and one-click drill-downs on specific dates within a report.

Community Mobile v2 now supports announcements at the community and board level.

With the 14.11 release, we've finished our rollout of enhancements to Ratings and Reviews, including ActiveCast SEO improvements and rich snippets for ActiveCast widgets.

New features and enhancements

Enable community members to close their accounts

Community admins can now let community members close their community accounts from their personal settings page.

Note: By default, the Close Account feature is disabled for all communities. To request this feature be enabled for your community, contact Lithium Support.

 

To give community members the option to close their account:

  1. Go to Community Admin > Users > Profile Defaults.
  2. Select Enable members to close their community account.
  3. Enter a name in the For deleted member accounts, display this username (This name will be used for any posts or comments made by members who close their account; if no name is entered, “Anonymous” is used.)
  4. Click Save.

 

Then, to close their account, members would:

  1. Sign in to the community.
  2. Click My Settings to go to their profile page.
  3. Click Personal Profile > Close Account.
  4. Click Close Account.

 

After a member closes their account:

  • All posts and comments made by the member will still be available but will be listed under the username that the community admin entered under Community Admin > Users > Profile Defaults.
  • Any badges, kudos, accepted solutions that member earned will be cleared. If the person re-registers with the community, the member cannot reclaim their old username and must start from scratch.
  • The username is freed up and can be used for another account.

Additionally, as a Community Admin, you can close another user’s account in two ways:

  • Go to Community Admin > Users > Edit Users > Find a user, select the user you want to delete, and click Close Account.
  • If the Enable members to close their community account setting is enabled, you can switch to the profile for that user that you want to delete and then follow the instructions listed above.

Closed Caption support for uploaded videos

You can now add a Closed Caption file to your uploaded videos. Closed Caption files must be in XML.

Note: You are now able to upload your Closed Caption file to be rendered within the Ooyala video player. For more information about creating an XML Closed Caption file, refer to:

 

To enable users to upload closed caption files:

  1. Go to Community Admin > Features > Videos.
  2. Select the Allow users to upload closed captions.
  3. Click Save.

 

To upload a closed caption file and attach it to an uploaded video:

  1. Sign in to the community and go to the post where you’ve uploaded your video.
  2. Open the Video Options menu and click Upload Closed Captions.
  3. In the Upload Closed Captions window, click Browse and select your XML closed caption file.
  4. Click Upload.

Now, when you play the video, the video player includes the options to turn captions on and off:

If you later decide to update the closed caption file, just open the Video Options menu and click Upload Closed Captions. Then, select a new XML file to replace the existing one. Similarly, you can remove the closed caption file from the video by selecting Delete Closed Captions.

New LSI First Reply metrics

You can now view First Reply metrics for Forums and Q&A boards within Lithium Social Intelligence (LSI). The new First Reply metrics are:

  • First Reply < 24 hours: Number of first replies to posts within the first 24 hours after the threads were originally posted, for the specified date range.
  • First Reply > 24 hours: Number of first replies to posts that occurred more than 24 hours after the thread was originally posted, for the specified date range.
  • Total # of First Replies: Total number of first replies that have happened during the specific date range. (This might include replies on threads that were created before the start date of the report.)

To view First Reply metrics in LSI:

  1. Sign in to the community.
  2. Click Lithium Social Intelligence in the Community Dashboard.
  3. Click the CONTENT tab.
  4. Click Forums or Q&A. The new First Reply metrics are displayed in the table at the bottom of the page:


    If the First Reply metrics are not displayed, open the Gear menu, click Manage Columns, select the metric you want from the list, and click Save.
  5. (Optional) Click a time period in the metric header.

One-click date drill-down for LSI reports

When viewing an LSI report that spans multiple days, you can now click any date column in the graph to drill-down to the data for that specific day, as shown here:

 

Support for announcements for Mobile v2

Mobile v2 now supports announcements text. All announcements support basic element styling and links.

Announcement text messages can appear on almost any page. You determine the location of the announcements module when you lay out the page in Studio. The scope of general announcements depends on where you set them up. You can set up announcements at the community or board level. If you define an announcement at the community level, it appears on all boards. If you define it at the forum level, it appears only on that forum. In the absence of forum-level announcements, the community-level announcement appears on all forums.

Note: By default, the announcements feature is disabled.

 

To set up announcements:

  1. Go to Community Admin > Content > Announcements.
  2. Click Choose and navigate to a specific board.
    You see the text for any announcements that have already been set up at the community level.
  3. Enter the text of your message in the appropriate Announcements text field. You can include HTML markup in the text to format it or to include links.
  4. Click Save.

Here’s an example of a community-wide announcement on Mobile V2:

 

Note: Other than basic styling, like bold and italics, additional styling is stripped from announcement text when displayed on Community Mobile v2.

ActiveCast SEO enhancements

Lithium's ActiveCast widgets function with JavaScript. Now, for a subset of widgets, we provide an option that enables you to create a non-JavaScript (or noscript) version. The noscript option is available for the Product List, Product Reviews, and Product Rating Summary widgets. These widgets are part of our Ratings and Reviews feature.

The noscript option enables search crawlers that do not execute JavaScript to access the content displayed in the ActiveCast widget, consequently improving search engine optimization (SEO) for your product ratings and reviews content.

In addition, the noscript option provides a graceful solution for browsers and devices that do not have JavaScript enabled.

You might be asking why we provide noscript options for the Product Rating Summary, Product Review, and Product List widgets but not for all of the ActiveCast widgets. The answer has to do with how and where product, product review, and product rating data are displayed. Other ActiveCast widgets, such as Q&A, Ask a Question, and Featured Topics, all syndicate content that is visible in your community and is readily available to search crawlers for indexing. Product and product review data, including 1-5 star product ratings and review helpfulness rating data, are not visible in the community. The noscript option surfaces this data for SEO.

Note: The JavaScript and noscript options can be used together in the same page. In addition, JavaScript and noscript versions of the ActiveCast widgets listed above include microdata markup so that rich snippets can be generated in search results.

Find configuration instructions for creating a non-JavaScript version of your ratings and reviews ActiveCast widgets in Create non-JavaScript versions of ActiveCast widgets for SEO.

Rich snippets for ActiveCast widgets in search engine results

The Product List, Product Reviews, and Product Rating Summary ActiveCast JavaScript widgets and their noscript alternative pages include microdata (as defined by schema.org) to alert search engines that product and review information is rendered by the page.

When search engines crawl pages that have these ActiveCast widgets on them the search engines can use the microdata on these pages to generate rich snippets on their search results pages that give the searcher a quick view into the type of content being presented by those pages, such as price, review, and rating information).

 

Learn how Lithium uses microdata in our Ratings and Reviews widgets, and how to disable microdata in the widgets in Community Admin in Microdata and rich snippets for ActiveCast widgets.

API changes

When your community is upgraded to version 14.11, the “response” object which wraps all HTTP-based API v2 responses will no longer be returned.

Note: This change does not apply to API v2 calls made via FreeMarker. 

 

While easy to fix, this change might  break your existing customizations and integrations. Here’s what the API responses look like before and after the change:

 

Before version 14.11:

 

After version 14.11:

 

To fix your code, simply remove any reference to the top-level “response” object. 

You Found It. We Fixed It.

  • Search no longer returns an error when users search for words and the community’s default language is set to Spanish (Latin America).
  • When merging topics made on various dates, the posts within the threads are now displayed in the correct order.
  • Previously, if you ran any of the user reports under Community Admin > Metrics > User Reports while your personal time zone configuration was set to a time zone West of the time zone of the server, all the date pickers on the page displayed a date one day earlier than you requested. However, the data that was returned was accurate for the originally entered dates. This display issue has been fixed for all Community Admin date pickers.
  • When the Swedish language pack was enabled and you used relative dates (set under Community Admin > System > Date & Time), the incorrect date and time were displayed. This issue has been fixed.
  • Clicking the View All link for recent posts in a user’s profile now returns all of the posts by that user, not all posts from the community.
  • Members now receive notifications in their Notification Feed when they receive Kudos on their TKB articles.

 

Refer to the attached Known Issues list for an update on open issues that we’re currently investigating.

Updated 9 months ago
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JohnD's avatar
Khoros Alumni (Retired)
Joined March 14, 2013
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4 Comments

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  • Fellsteruk's avatar
    Fellsteruk
    Boss
    11 years ago

    Nice little update, i like the ability for users to close their accounts, will save a fair bit of admin doing these manually. 

  • JakeR's avatar
    JakeR
    Khoros Oracle
    11 years ago

    Fellsteruk - I agree that the 'Close Account' feature is incredibly helpful (at first blush).  But putting on a 'best-practices' hat for a second and looking at it from a Community Manager's perspective, how are you addressing this idea of the posts being deleted?  Is there concern about loss of thread continuity?  It seems like there could be a loss of SEO, a loss of Accepted Solutions, etc.

     

    Of course, that could be fine, and a trade-off that the business is willing to accept.  But is it something that you crafted a policy and/or guidelines around in order to accommodate?

     

    Again, I think think this is a great enhancement to the Lithium platform, but my instinct is that a certain level of conservatism and/or caution must be used when leveraging this enhancement.  Thoughts? 

  • Ulf's avatar
    Ulf
    Guide
    11 years ago

    JakeR : I think the "Close Account" feature is very valuable, and it's an option we've been missing for a good while - particularly with the "Right to be forgotten", an automated anonymizing feature like this is great for us in the EU.

     

    When a user closes his/her account, none of that user's posts or images are deleted - only the user profile is scoured clean. It says so in the documentation, and I've tested this on our Staging environment, so I've had no problem rolling out the feature.

     

    However, be aware that if your community is "behind" an SSO, there is currently an issue where a user logged in with an SSO who closes his/her account cannot create a new profile later. I've been told that there's a fix in the pipeline, and anyway I think the benefits outweigh this - I've been sure to adapt the dialogues to reflect this.

     

    This is how I did it:

    - Test extensively on Staging.
    - Adapt the dialogues and text in Studio to reflect the SSO-issue.
    - Notify the superusers about the new feature and the SSO-limitation, and show them a screenshot of what a post by a closed account looks like.
    - Roll it out "silently".

     

    I think it's a great feature that strikes the right balance between the right to be forgotten and our concerns about losing content :)

  • JakeR's avatar
    JakeR
    Khoros Oracle
    11 years ago

    Ulf - Ah, thank you for the clarification.  My earlier post (above) had some incorrect conclusions in it!  Very happy to be corrected and learn that a user's messages are not deleted when the 'close account' feature is leveraged.

     

    You're absolutely right.  The documentation does explicitly say:

     

    All posts and comments made by the member will still be available but will be listed under the username that the community admin entered under Community Admin > Users > Profile Defaults.

     

    Oddly, the screenshoted message (in the document above) that informs the user that he or she is closing their account does say something to the effect of...

     

    When your account is removed, all kudos, accepted solutions, and acheivements will be permanenently deleted.

     

    Fortunatley, that is messaging that can easily be altered in Lithium Studio.  Good to know that at the heart of the feature, no user-generated content will be deleted.