14.2 Release Notes

Note: These release notes were updated on March 18, 2014 to include new information about automatic enabling of free spam management.

 

In the 14.2 release, we’re announcing many updates, including an automatic way to improve the overall trustworthiness of conversations on your community, an updated user experience around creating those conversations, a new report to let you get insights about where community visitors are coming from, and once they’re there, a new private message opt-in workflow to help you comply with local regulations about private conversations on a social platform.

 

First, we’re offering new spam management tools that automatically intercept potentially malicious content and quarantine it for moderator review, independent of Lithium Moderation Manager. All customers will be configured for free spam management automatically. A new version of the Rich Text Editor is now available, which provides a richer and more stable experience for your users who write and respond to posts. Lithium Social Intelligence now provides a new report so you can identify which sites are the top referrers to your community. Private Messenger now enables you to require all members to accept a Terms of Use agreement before getting access to the feature.

 

New Features and Enhancements

Lithium Communities

• New spam management tools
• New version of Rich Text Editor
• Preview multiple rich content previews in posts
• Opt-in Terms of Use Agreement for Private Messages
• URL transliteration for better SEO

Lithium Developer Network

• Caching in customer components and endpoints
• New Studio Component Reference Guide 

Lithium Social Intelligence

• New top referrers report

Lithium Communities

New spam management tools

 

Lithium is committed to making sure that your communities serve up the highest-value content to your community members. To meet that promise, we continue to look for ways to help you combat spam.

 

Lithium’s new, free spam detection tools run in the background. Each new message is automatically logged and tested for spam. Additionally, our system learns about the content on your site as it monitors all your boards and forums, enabling it to improve its content filtering over time. (During the first couple of months, you'll need to review what the system does to help it learn more about your site content.)

 

Important: The Spam Filtering and Quarantine feature is available to all customers. To have this feature enabled in your environment, open a Support case.

 

Important: The automated system only evaluates posts on forums and boards that have been configured for post moderation (Post-Mod) under Community Admin > Mod Tools > Moderation. Posts in forums and boards set for Pre-Mod or None bypass this automated system and are not reflected in the new spam-related metrics described below. Learn how to configure your moderation settings.

   

Specifically, with the new spam management tools:

 

• Messages are automatically tested for spam
• Messages that are classified as spam are automatically rejected
• You can mark all existing posts by a given user as spam
• You can mark individual posts as spam
• You can recover posts that were mistakenly marked as spam by the automatic system
• You can view new Admin Metrics to track spam management activity

 

This release also includes a simplified spam quarantine page, where you can view a list of all posts automatically marked as spam:

 

If you discover that a post has been marked as spam mistakenly, you can just check the misclassified posts and click Not Spam to recover the posts.

 

Important: During the first month, you should monitor the Spam Quarantine daily and confirm that the automated system is capturing the right content as spam. Take the time to mark mistakenly identified posts as Non Spam. Also, if you have Moderation Manager, mark spam posts as needed. This not only properly categorizes these posts, but also helps the spam management tools to learn more about your content and make better decisions in the future.

 

To search for specific posts in the quarantine list:

 

1. In the Community Dashboard widget, click Spam Quarantine to open the Spam Quarantine page.
2. Select Posts (to search for posts with specific terms) or Users (to search for posts by a specific user) from the search drop-down menu.
3. Enter the term or user name and click Search.
4. Review the results and modify your search, if needed. 

New Admin Metric reports are provided to help you measure spam-related activity.

 

To view metrics related to spam activity:

 

1. Go to Community Admin > Metrics.
2. In the Views Tree, open the Traffic Reports folder.
3. Click the spam report you want to view:

• Overall non-spam posts: The total number of posts, excluding those marked as spam.
• Auto-classified Spam: Number of posts automatically marked as spam.
• Manually Marked Spam: Number of posts that were not automatically marked as spam but were later manually classified as spam by a moderator.
• Manually Marked Not Spam: Number of posts mistakenly marked as spam by the automatic spam filter and later approved as not being spam by a moderator.

Note: There is a subtle difference between Overall non-spam posts and the existing Overall posts metrics. The Overall non-spam posts report includes all non-spam posts for only those posts processed by the automated spam filter. Overall posts includes all posts the have gone through pre-mod, post-mod, or no moderation. So, most times, Overall non-spam posts will be a smaller number than Overall posts.

New version of Rich Text Editor available

With the 14.2 release, you can request to get the latest version of the Rich Text Editor enabled for your community (powered by TinyMCE version 4.0.18) which offers a new, more modern UI.  The Rich Text Editor is used by default in most places where members create and edit content, including forum topics and replies, blog articles, TKB articles, ideas, questions, comments, and private messages.

 

TinyMCE, the technology partner behind the Rich Text Editor offers a number of new features, usability improvements, and several fixes to known issues. Check out the TinyMCE 4 presentation for a more detailed overview of what’s new.

 

To give you time to test drive the new version of the Rich Text Editor against any customizations and give you time to announce the coming changes to your community, we will enable the new version of the editor on your stage site upon your upgrade to 14.2, and then give you until April 30^th to prepare for the changes before enabling it on your production community by default. If you want the new version of the Rich Text Editor on your production community sooner, just let us know when you’re ready to roll it out and Support will enable it for you.

 

Note: If you have any modifications to the default configuration of the Rich Text Editor, such as adding, removing, or changing the order of buttons, Lithium will work with you to port over these customizations to the new version. We are aware if you’ve made any such customizations and will reach out to you separately by email to work out the details of your upgrade before the deadline next month. If you don’t hear from us, you don’t have any customizations that need to be ported for the upgrade.

 

Preview multiple rich content previews in posts

Prior to the 13.12 release, you could add rich content to posts, but you could add only one URL per post. Now, you can copy and paste in up to 10 URLs from approved providers (http://embed.ly/embed/features/providers) into your post.

Note: If you do not see the option in Admin to turn on Rich Content Link Preview in your production community, contact Support.

Here’s an example with links to three videos added to a post:

 

Opt-in Terms of Use Agreement for Private Messenger

Private Messenger enables you to send private notes to other community members. To use Private Messenger, you must be registered and signed in.

 

 

Starting with this release, if local regulations require it, you can configure your community to require members to sign a Terms of Use agreement and opt in to use the private messaging feature.

 

With this option, the Private Messenger is disabled for each community member by default until each member is prompted to read and accept the terms of use for this feature. Community members who do not accept the terms of use do not get access to the feature, and do not gain the ability to send or receive private messages. 

 

Note: Members who do not accept the terms of use and choose not to opt in to use private messenger still receive notifications (such as rank changes, group invites, mod status) via email, based on their notification settings. 

 

Members can decide to opt in later and enable private messages via their profile settings.

 

To opt in and enable private messages manually:

 

1. Sign in to the community.
2. Go to My Settings > Preferences > Private Messenger.
3. Enable Turn on private messages.
4. Click Save.

 

Your legal department might require you to make specific changes to the Terms of Use text for the Private Messenger opt-in message. 

 

To edit the Private Messenger opt-in message:

 

1. Go to Studio > Text Editor.
2. Click Community Text.
3. In the Search for text key field, enter page.user_profile.acceptPrivateNotes_options.description.
4. Click Search.
5. Copy the paragraph with the opt-in text to your clipboard.


   
6. Click in the Text Properties box and paste the text from the clipboard.


   
   Note: If you have already added custom text strings in this area, paste this text at the bottom, being careful not to overwrite your other customizations.

   
7. Edit the text message as needed.
8. Click Save.
9. Publish your changes to production.

URL Transliteration for better SEO

Lithium now supports URL transliteration, which provides one-way string transliteration (or Romanization) to clean up the problematic display of characters in URLs and on search engine results pages in languages such as Russian, Chinese, Greek, Arabic, Korean, and Japanese (see note below).

In other words, it takes Unicode text and represents it in US-ASCII characters (universally displayable, unaccented characters) by transliterating the pronunciation expressed by the text in some other writing system to Roman letters. Characters in such URLs become more readable, which improves the likelihood that they will to be visited by users.

For example, before transliteration, a URL with problematic characters might get converted into something like this:

  

With the new transliteration feature, the URL is cleaned up to look something like this:

 

Note: We can't reliably transliterate Japanese Kanji characters, since these characters are also used in  Chinese. Additionally, most Japanese Kanji characters have more than one way to read it, depending on what other characters are paired with it.

Lithium Developer Network

Caching in custom components and endpoints 

You can now perform user-level and application-level caching in custom components and endpoints with the usercache and appcache FreeMarker context objects. Application-level caching is considered an advanced developer feature. Be sure to read the full documentation for these objects before using them in your customizations.

 

usercache and appcache are ideal for caching data that updates frequently and requires multiple REST calls to generate. Data cached at the application level is visible to all users, including anonymous users, and can be overwritten by any user. Data cached at the user level is limited to that user. Only the user can write to his or her own cache.  

 

For details and examples see:

• Caching in custom components and endpoints
• appcache FreeMarker context object
• usercache FreeMarker context object

New Studio Component Reference Guide 

A few releases ago, we overhauled the Studio Component descriptions and enabled you to view information about each component via a pop-up help window:  

 

We realize that it might be useful to see all this information in a component reference guide so you can search for the specific information you need.

 

Starting with the 14.2 release, we are publishing the contents of all the hover help into a PDF reference guide, which will be kept up to date with each release and be attached to the About components article in the Doc Knowledge Base.

Lithium Social Intelligence 

New top referrers report

 

LSI now includes a top referrers report so you can track the number of community visits that originate from specific URL domains. This report helps you understand how much traffic is coming in from different search engines, social networks, or links on your company website.

 

Note: Referrer numbers include only those visits that originate from an external link/location. It does not include visits that have no referrer link (for example, pages opened from a previous bookmark or URLs typed in  directly by the visitor.

 

To view the Referrer Traffic report:

 

1. Sign in to the community.
2. Click Lithium Social Intelligence in the Community Dashboard.
3. Click the TRAFFIC tab.

4. Click Referrers.
   
5. (Optional) Click a time period in the metric header.
6. (Optional) Click Mobile to see how much of your traffic comes from mobile devices.
7. Hover over any metric bar to view more details.

You Found It. We Fixed It.

• The Me Too REST API call no longer fails with a permission-denied error for users with the appropriate permissions. (Community)
• When searching on community, search results now include all matching results, regardless of the language set in the user’s profile. (Community)
• When editing a Q&A, moderators can now remove attachments from the post. Previously, the attachment and the menu to remove it were not being displayed properly.
• Flooding controls for the Invite and Friend (Options > Invite a Friend) and Email a Friend (Article Options > Email to a Friend) features are now triggered properly. Users who exceed the number of configured messages they can send during the specified time period are now receiving the message prompting them to try again later.  
• Lithium Chat has been updated to work with older versions of the JRE (back to version 1.2). Lithium still strongly recommends using the most recent JRE version. (Community)