The 14.3 release includes enhancements to badges that enable you to create more complex rules for awarding a badge. We added a new email template for notifying members when topics they’re following are marked as accepted solutions. We also now provide new Lithium Social Intelligence metrics that help you measure the responsiveness of your Forums and Q&As.
New Features and Enhancements
Lithium Communities
- Advanced badge rule enhancements
- Enhanced page header components
- New Accepted as Solution notification to solution authors
- New Community Admin Permissions Guide
- Updated developer doc navigation on Lithium Community
Lithium Social Intelligence
Advanced badge rule enhancements
With the addition of an AND operator that you can add in between all supported badge rule criteria, you can now create more complex badge rule epxressions that require multiple rules to be met before a badge is awarded. You can access this new capability in the Advanced Editor when you create and edit badges that are not yet live.
Common use cases for badges with multiple rule criteria include profile completion tasks and more complex engagement options. For example, you might want to award a “VIP Contributor” badge to members who:
- Have received at least 100 kudos
- Have had at least 25 answers marked as Accepted Solutions
- Have posted at least 10 blog articles
This powerful addition to rule creation also enables you to use community roles as an additional requirement for any badges based on user activity. By taking advantage of the "unlocking" game dynamic, you can set certain badges to be earnable only after a community member has reached a rank that grants them the required role.
Learn more about assigning roles automatically by ranks to get set up for these types of badges.
To create a complex badge rule:
- Go to Community Admin > Users > Badges.
- Click the Create tab and then click Create.
- Enter your badge info at the top.
- In the Rule section, click Make a selection and click Advanced Editor.
- Enter each rule you want met (making sure that each rule has an identifier, operator, and value). Enter AND between each rule.
- Click Save.
Remember, only members who meet all the badge criteria are awarded this badge.
Let’s say you want to create a “Profile Complete” badge for new members to encourage them to complete key parts of their member profile (name, signature, default language, social media names).
You might create a rule like this:
Note: At this time, you cannot create complex rules with OR or NOT.
This enhancement is available to all customers who have purchased Lithium Premium Gamification. Reach out to your Account Executive to learn more.
Enhanced page header components
We’ve added new components that you can use to modernize the page elements that are critical to giving community members quick access to their Private Messages, Profile, personal Settings, Subscriptions, Help, and the sign-in/out pages from your community header.
Currently, the Header Page quilt includes the default User Navigation Links component and the Private Message Indicator component, shown here:
When a community member is signed in, the new User Navigation Menu displays the member’s avatar to make their identity more visible and includes a drop-down menu with links to commonly accessed pages and actions, as before.
The updated Private Message Count component now uses text instead of an icon to designate the entry point to the private message inbox. In also includes a more visible indicator that alerts community members when they have unread private messages.
You can now swap out the original components for the new ones in the default Header Page quilt or in your custom Header Page quilt, if you’ve created one. Just replace:
- Private Message Indicator with Private Message Count
(Go to Studio > Page > Components: Global > Private Message Count.) - User Navigation Links with User Navigation Menu
(Go to Studio > Page > Components: Navigation > User Navigation Menu.)
Check out using components in Studio for additional help.
New Accepted Solution notification to solution authors
We’ve added a new email template that enables you to automatically notify an author of a reply to a topic or an answer to a question that got accepted as a solution by another community member (usually the question author). This email notification informs the solution author that their answer was found to be very helpful, even if they are not currently logged into the community. This can encourage members to come back and create more helpful posts.
This email is sent to members when their reply or answer to a topic or question is marked as an accepted solution.
Note: The Accepted Solutions feature must be turned on by Support and must also be enabled in Community Admin > Features > Accepted Solutions.
To view the contents of this email template:
- Go to Studio > Text Editor > Email Text.
- Open the Select Email Template menu and select Answer accepted as solution notification.
- Click View.
The new Answer accepted as solution notification email complements the existing (old) Accepted solution notification email that is sent when a reply to a topic or an answer to a question multiple members are following has been accepted as a solution.
To learn more about how to edit the contents of email templates or learn more about their trigger conditions, refer to Edit email text and understand email templates in the Documentation Knowledge Base.
New Community Admin Permissions Guide
A few releases ago, we updated all the tooltips for the permissions in Community Admin:
We realize that it might be useful to see all this information in a permissions reference guide so you can search for the specific information you need.
Starting with the 14.3 release, we are publishing the contents of all the Community Admin Permissions tooltips into a PDF reference guide, which will be kept up to date with each release and be attached to the Permission Descriptions article in the Documentation Knowledge Base.
Updated Developer Doc Navigation on Lithium Community
With the recent release of the Lithium Social Web (LSW) Author API, we are renaming the REST API used with the Community platform to Community API. Our Developer Network side navigation now includes separate entries to take you to our Community API documentation you are used to seeing, and to the new LSW API knowledge base articles.
New metrics for minutes to first reply and first solution
Minutes to first reply and minutes to first accepted solution are metrics used by many communities to measure the responsiveness of their Forums and Q&As. With the 14.3 release, Lithium Social Intelligence (LSI) now provides minutes to first reply and minutes to first accepted solution metrics at the thread level for forums and Q&As for specific date ranges.
Note: Data for minutes to first reply and first solution will only go back to the time when your community was upgraded to 13.10 or later.
Be aware that LSI reports count metrics only within the date range of the report. Therefore a thread that has a minutes to first reply of 0 minutes could mean that:
- the thread has not yet been replied to
- the first reply happened outside the date range of the report
Similarly, you might have times when the thread has 5 replies but still have a minutes-to-first-reply value of 0. This means that there were 5 replies within the date range of the report, but that the first reply happened before the date range of report.
Note: Deleted messages also are counted as a first reply even though they might not be visible anymore.
At the board level, minutes to first reply (average) and minutes to first solution (average) indicate the responsiveness of a specific board in your community.
Note: You will not see minutes to first reply or first solution in category reports because categories can include other applications that do not get replies (for example, Ideas).
To view the average minutes to first reply for a forum or Q&A:
- Sign in to the community.
- Click Lithium Social Intelligence in the Community Dashboard.
- Click the CONTENT tab.
- Click Forums or Q&A.
- Click the Minutes to First Reply (Avg) column to see a chart of this metric.
To view the average minutes to first solution for a forum or Q&A:
- Sign in to the community.
- Click Lithium Social Intelligence in the Community Dashboard.
- Click the CONTENT tab.
- Click Forums or Q&A.
- Click the Minutes to First Solution (Avg) column to see a chart of this metric.
You Found It. We Fixed It.
- New messages created with the REST API (message.author) trigger email notifications for the author of the message. Previously, there was an issue where the author’s notification settings were being ignored. This issue has been fixed, and messages created via the REST API now adhere to the notification preferences set by the author.
- Calling the REST API object for view/allowed no longer returns incorrect values if the object appears more than once on the page. Previously, the first instance would return false, and the second one would return true. This issue has been fixed, and both instances return false, if the same object is repeated twice on a page.
- The spam filtering tool, which automatically identifies spam articles and places them in the Spam Quarantine no longer marks filter and abuse notifications as spam. These notifications are no longer put into the Spam Quarantine; these reports now remain in the dedicated nodes, where community moderators can find and review them.
- Sometimes, when using SSO, multiple users can have the same username. In these scenarios, when a user sends a Private Message, the user is prompted to choose the specific user to send the message to, which is normal. However, when the user received a response and tried to reply again with a private message, the user was prompted to choose the user name again. This issue of prompting the user to select the user again has been fixed; the system now remembers which user this message is associated with and doesn’t prompt you to choose the name.
