The 14.6 Release delivers several new features designed to increase user engagement and improve ease of use on your community. Improvements in community search enable your users to find the information they want faster and easier, even if they don’t type exactly what they mean to. Lithium Social Intelligence continues to deliver new metrics so you can always know exactly where and how your members are engaging on your site. Finally, we have fixed a variety of customer-found issues.

New Features and Enhancements

• Community search improvements
• Receive emails when your community is upgraded
• New Lithium Social Intelligence metrics (Solution Views and Member Time)

Community search improvements

The 14.6 release includes significant improvements to our community search algorithms and user experience with two new features:

• Spellchecked search
• Combinatorial search

Note: At this time, these new search features only work with the normal site search. They do not apply to Advanced Search or to searches done directly through the API. Also, search on Community Mobile v1 and Community Mobile v2 do not yet take advantage of these changes.

Spellchecked search

Community search now supports automatic spellcheck. For example, if you search for “Streo speakers”, the system recognizes the spelling error and adjusts the search in real-time to “Stereo speakers”.

Search strings entered by users are spellchecked using a weighted dictionary specific to the current community context. When a user does a search, their original search is used as well as a spellchecked version. Depending on the outcomes of the two searches (i.e. if one seems to have better results than the other), the search results page displays either the results for the original string or the corrected one.

Similarly, if you misspell a word and there could be multiple options for what the correct word is (for example, “chil” could be “chili” or “child”), the search chooses the most likely correct word based on the context and frequency of all the possible terms in the content being searched.

Along with the search results, additional information and options are shown in different situations:

• "Showing results for [corrected string]" / "Search instead for [original string]" action link is displayed if the misspelled string had results, but the spellchecked results are better and are therefore shown on the search results page. The user can then click to conduct the original search instead.
  
  
• "Do you mean [original string]" is displayed if the misspelled string had sufficient results and are therefore shown on the search results page, but there are also results using the corrected string. The user can then click to perform the corrected search instead.
  
  

Search Best practice: If you don’t already have one, consider adding a custom dictionary to your community with domain- and brand-specific terms. Although brand-specific terms that occur a lot in the searched content should be left alone as correct search terms, the best way to guarantee that these words are not changed is to use a custom dictionary. (For example. The term “uverse” might be corrected to “universe”. But on an AT&T site, “uverse” is a valid search term.)

Combinatorial search

Lithium Community now supports combinatorial search. When combinatorial search is enabled and a user enters a multi-term search string, various combinations of the individual terms are used to conduct the search to generate the search results. Previously, all terms in the string needed to be matched before a result was shown. Now the search uses a fuzzier heuristic.

When combinatorial search is enabled, the search algorithm weighs each word in the search string based on the number of relevant words found in the titles, posts, and comments. The number of messages a term appears in determines its relevance. Additional factors that influence a match’s placement in the search results list include:

• Number of keywords in the title of a post
• Number of keywords in the body of the post
• Number of keywords in the comments in the complete thread
• Popularity and usefulness of post (based on kudos and accepted solutions it’s received)

Note: Combinatorial search can process up to 10 keywords at a time and returns results that have at least n-1 matches to your search string. For example, if you search for “cleaning speakers wipes”, the search results will include results that have at least 2 of these words.

Enabling the new search features

By default, spellchecking and combinatorial search are enabled for all communities using Spellcheck v2.

To turn off these search improvements, you must file a Support ticket.

Note: If you want to take advantage of these new search features and aren’t already using Spellcheck v2, file a Support ticket.

Multilanguage support

The new search features work for each language for which Lithium includes a dictionary. These languages include:

If your community supports multiple languages, you need to include the plug-in for each supported language. Similarly, you need include the dictionary for each language your community supports to take advantage of these spellcheck-related search features. File a Support ticket to make these configuration changes.

Receive emails when your community is upgraded

From time to time, your Lithium community is upgraded to a newer version. You can now configure the system to email you or your community admin when the system is upgraded.

To set up community upgrade email notifications:

1. Go to Community Admin > System > Maintenance.
2. In the Email community update notification to field, enter the email address that you’d like upgrade notifications sent to.
   
   
3. Click Save.

New Lithium Social Intelligence Metrics (Solution Views and Member Time)

Solution Views

Lithium Social Intelligence now provides metrics for Solution Views. A Solution View is a count of the page views of threads with an Accepted Solution, after the thread has had a message marked as an Accepted Solution.

Solution Views metrics are available for:

• Forums
• Q&A

To view Solution Views for a Forum or Q&A board:

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.

Solution Views for each forum or Q&A is displayed:

Note: You can click any forum or Q&A in the list to see more granular data.

Member Time

Lithium Social Intelligence now enables you to report on how long registered members stay on your site. The new Member Time metric indicates the total number of minutes from first page request to last page request for each visit of all registered members on your community during the date range of the report.

Member time does not capture the time of actions, such as kudos, unless the member requests a new page after the action. Nor does it include the last 30 minutes after the last page request before the session times out. Member time is calculated from the time of the first page request, such that a session that started at 11:50pm on day 1 and ending at 12:15am on day 2 is counted as member time for day 1.  

To view the amount of time members stay on your site:

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

Member Time, which captures the total number of minutes all members stay onsite, displays at the bottom of the Members Overview page:

Alternatively, you can view member time in the Traffic Referrers report:

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

Note: Total time is the amount of time between first page request and last page request for all users (anonymous and registered) who came in via the referral URL.

API Changes

Retrieve the ID of the skin used on the current page

We’ve added the skin.id call to the Skin FreeMarker context object used in custom components to return the ID for the skin used for the current page.

You Found It. We Fixed It.

• After creating a custom TKB page in Studio (for example, TkbPage.CustomTest), you were not able to set its TKB options under TKB > TKB Options > TKB Admin > Content > Custom Pages. Previously, only the forum options displayed. This problem had been fixed, and you can now set all the options for the custom TKB page.
• Query string parameters are no longer dropped when an anonymous user follows a link to a private area. Instead, the query strings now remain intact for subsequent redirects.
• When users set their preferences to use the Rich Text Editor by default (My Settings > Preference Options > Use the Rich Text Editor by Default) and then tried to write an article (for example, in a Blog), they were unable to choose the Rich Text Editor when editing the article teaser. Now, regardless of how this setting is configured, the article teaser uses the Rich Text Editor, and the Rich Text Editor setting applies to the body of the article.
• Clicking the Show More Posts button on a page with the Hot Topics Stream enabled no longer produces an error.
• Previously, when you received an email notifying you that you had a private message (PM), the time zone stamp was always in Pacific Daylight Time (PDT), even if your personal settings and your system device were set to another time zone. This issue has been fixed, and the time stamp for PMs is now based on your personal settings.
• Members now receive email notifications when a post they made in a private node has been marked as an Accepted Solution. Previously, the email notification was not being sent to the member who made the post.
• At times, components being used on the community were being misidentified in the Studio component “Where am I using this” pane in the hover help as not being used on any quilts. In these cases, Studio provided the message “You’re not using this component anywhere in your community” even though the components appeared on the community site. This error occurred when components were being used on nested quilts for message pages. This issue has been fixed, and the “Where am I using this” pane is providing the correct information.
• Previously, if your community was configured to display a member’s rank icon next to the user name (set under Community Admin > Users > Ranking > Display an icon to the left/right of the user’s name) and a post by that member ended up in the Spam Quarantine, the entry in the Spam Quarantine table did not display correctly. The text of the post was pushed out of view. This display issue has been fixed.
• As part of a UI text sweep to make our use of the terms “username”, “login”, “signin” more clear and consistent across the desktop and mobile community experiences, a couple of text strings were changed incorrectly. As a result, when performing a search, the text “logins” and “Total Logins” were replaced with “usernames” and “Total usernames” instead of “signins” and “Total Signins”. These default text strings have been changed to display the correct terminology.
• When creating a TKB, you can set the number of articles to display on a page before the pagination controls display. For example, you can set the Number of articles per page on TKB pages to 20. In this example, the TKB should display the list of 20 articles on one page and not display the pagination controls until the 21^st article is added. Instead, in some cases, TKBs were ignoring this setting and starting pagination after 10 articles. This issue has been resolved.
• Previously, if you included a link (URL) in the community or private message, the host name was stripped from the HTML, resulting in link with a relative path. Although these links worked fine within the community, the links were broken in email notifications since there was no way to tell the URL which host name to use. This issue has been fixed and now fully qualified URLs are used in these email notifications.
• When changing the status for an idea in an Idea Exchange, members can click Add a comment with this status change and enter a comment to explain why they changed the status. Previously, this field supported only plain text, so any line breaks (to have multiple paragraphs in the comment) and special formatting were removed. This issue has been fixed, and the comment field now retains paragraph breaks as well as any special formatting.