In this release, we are excited to launch a series of new products and enhancements to our Community platform that are now GA, which give users an improved customer experience. In 15.9 we launched Responsive which improved the user experience across devices and in 15.10 we are continuing to improve the user experience by providing the ability for users to more easily share and receive rich media, better ways to discover content and more ways to share their opinions and advice with peers. Read more about this fall's Community product launch in this press release.

• Value Analytics lets Lithium customers use purpose-built surveys to measure the business impact of their community, arming you with the data you need to make decisions and take action.
• A more modern Media Experience featuring new layouts and image capabilities helps consumers move beyond text and easily share rich media within a community, just as they do on other parts of the social web.
• Ratings & Reviews enhancements empower consumers to share their ideas, opinions, and content in multiple ways. Enhancements include the addition of multidimensional reviews and associated reporting in Lithium Social Intelligence (LSI).
• SEO enhancements make the right content more easily discoverable and shareable from your community and across other digital and social channels.
• GA of the Lithium-Klout SDK, which empowers developers to use native tools when customizing the Lithium platform.

Additional features include improvements to the Float Accepted Solutions feature, support for reporting spam in private messages, and badge creation improvements.

To learn more about how you can get the most out of these new products and feature enhancements, contact your Lithium Customer Success Manager.

New Features

• Value Analytics
• Media Experience
• Lithium AngularJS integration support
• Ratings & Reviews enhancements: multidimensional reviews and reporting
• SEO enhancements
• Lithium Community Plugin SDK
• Additional enhancements
• API changes
• Badge enhancements
• Improvements to the Float Accepted Solutions feature
• Spam reporting support for private messages
• Advanced tab in Studio
• Robots Exclusion Protocol Editor in Studio

Value Analytics

Through a series of standardized survey questions, community managers can easily quantify the performance of their community for users and the impact of the community on their business. Value Analytics arms you with the data you need to make decisions and take action.

Value Analytics enables you to:

• Calculate call deflections generated by the community
• Assess user satisfaction with the community experience (customer satisfaction)
• Measure impact of the community experience on likelihood to refer (using Net Promoter Score®)
• Quantify the “success rate” of user visits and the ultimate impact on customer support costs, if applicable
• Identify high-performing areas of the community and areas that offer opportunities for improvement

Offering quick deployment out of the box, control over survey frequency and timing, and the ability to customize answer choices, Value Analytics delivers results directly to the Lithium Social Intelligence (LSI) analytics and reporting interface, as well as options to export data for drill-down analysis at the category, board, or rank level. Lithium’s Value Analytics is supported on both desktop and mobile devices. In addition, our team has the expertise and best practices to help you deploy Value Analytics successfully and interpret the data.

Your customers are always given the choice to opt-in to the survey:

Enable Value Analytics and configure global settings

Enabling Value Analytics on your site involves setting some global settings and then configuring settings for the actual survey.

Note: You can configure survey settings at the community or node level. So, you can turn surveys on everywhere or only on specific nodes. However, you can only have one version of the survey live at any time on your site. You choose and configure these questions only at the community level.

To enable Value Analytics:

1. Go to Community Admin > Features > Value Analytics.
2. Click Settings.
3. Click Turn on Value Analytics.
   Note: You still need to enable the individual survey before the survey appears on your site.
4. In the Community Name field, enter the community name, as you’d like it to appear in the survey text.
5. Set the values for when to prompt users with the survey:
   
   
   

    

   Prompt users with survey after this many visits: Sets the number of visits (0-1000) to wait before prompting a user to take a survey. For example, if set to 3, the user won’t be prompted to take the survey until the fourth visit. By default, this value is set to 0 (first visit).

   Prompt users with survey after this many seconds: Sets the number of seconds (0-60,000) to wait before prompting a user to take a survey. We recommend looking at your average site visit duration data and choose a delay that hits the sweet spot for your users, not too early that it interrupts what they’re trying to do, but not so long that they’ve left your site. By default, this value is set to 120. If you leave this field blank or set it to zero, the user is prompted immediately when they visit your site. (This setting is independent of the visit-based trigger.)

   Prompt user with survey after this many days: Sets the number of days  (0-365) to wait before prompting a user to take a survey, from the last time they took or declined to take the survey. If you leave this field blank or set it to zero, the user is prompted on their next visit. The default value is set to 90.
   
   

6. (Optional) Add your company logo to the survey window either by entering the URL for the image or by choosing a logo file you’ve uploaded into the Studio assets library.
   

   Tip: For best results, we recommend sizing your logo to 125x50 pixels.
   

7. Click Save.

Enable and customize the Impact survey

The Impact survey is a great way to capture customer data on how well your community is helping customers and gain insight into how many support cases are being deflected due to finding their answers on the community.

The Impact survey gathers more specific information about how your customers found or didn’t find their answer on your community site. You can customize the responses to these questions, as needed, based on your site’s structure and what you want to measure.

 

 

To enable and customize the Impact Survey:

1. Go to Community Admin > Features > Value Analytics.
2. (Optional) Click Choose and go to the specific node/page where you want to enable the survey.
   

   Note: You can choose to enable the survey at the community or node level, but you can only configure the questions and answers for the survey at the community level (described in steps 7-9).

3. Click the Impact Survey tab.
4. Click Enable Impact survey.
5.  Enter the Maximum number of responses to collect.
   Sets the maximum number of surveys to collect (100-1000000) each calendar month. The default is value is 1000. (You can configure this setting at the community or node level.)
   Note: The number of responses collected is indicated in the Current Count value.
   
6. To survey only users who are signed-in, check the Target signed-in users only option. (You can configure this setting at the community or node level.)
7.  Customize your impact survey. (You can customize questions and answers at the community level only.)
   

   For each survey question, check or clear the Include checkbox for each response option.
   
   

   Note: Be mindful when excluding answers from questions. Each question must have at least 2 answers. You cannot exclude all answers for a question to turn off the question.

8. For questions 3-5, you can change the text in the response options, if needed, to best reflect the metrics you want to measure.
   
   
   
   

   Note: If you later decide that you want to revert the responses back to their out-of-the box settings, just click Reset to default next to the response you want to change.

    

   Tip: Be mindful when changing these answers. The Value Analytics reports in LSI that calculate the survey results display only the current value for these answers. Changing the text or order of the answers could make it more difficult to analyze your results. As such, we recommend planning out your responses the best you can so your data is more consistent over time. If you do make changes in the text or order of the answers, jot down these changes and when you made them. That way, when you run your LSI reports, you can filter the report by specific date ranges to do comparative analysis.

9. To include the industry-standard NPS® (Net Promoter Score) question at the end of your survey, check the option to enable Question 6. (If you enable Question 6, it is used in place of Question 5 listed on this page.)
   
   

   The NPS® survey captures overall satisfaction with your customer’s support experience on your community site. NPS® surveys ask one, specific question, “How likely are you to recommend our company/product to a friend or colleague?”

    

   Answers are scored on a 1-10 scale, where a response of 9 or 10 indicates loyal enthusiasts (promoters), a score of 7 or 8 indicates passive enthusiasts, and scores 6 or below indicate detractors. NPS® is calculated by subtracting the percentage of customers who are detractors from the percentage of customers who are promoters.
   
   
   

10. Click Save.

Learn more about localizing your surveys and check out our Value Analytics tips and best practices.

View Value Analytics reports in LSI

LSI includes new value analytics reports so you can track customer engagement and satisfaction on your community site.

 

To run Value Analytics reports:

1.     Sign in to LSI.
2.     Click the Members tab.
3.     Click Value Analytics.

Results for the Impact survey questions are displayed:

By default, this report shows survey results for your entire community. However, you can zero in on specific areas or people in your community using the advanced filters. Using these filters, you can see and compare survey results for specific countries, roles, ranks, categories, or boards.

You can even get as granular as specific threads, user, or device type. The ability to get user analytics data for specific boards and roles is a powerful analytics feature, unique to Lithium.

Tip: Like other LSI reports, you can export these results to a CSV file if you want to drill into the data more granularly.

Media Experience

Media Experience is a top-to-bottom upgrade to how Lithium Community treats photo content. It increases engagement and traffic by enabling users to view, upload, and share media. This results in a better end user experience and improved SEO. It also helps you to create a more visually-engaging community experience.

Media Experience enables you to:

• surface photo content in your community
• engage users with new, visual community components
• empower users to share photos more easily

Media Experience includes the following features:

• Photo engagement components: Place these portable components on any page to make your community’s photos more discoverable. Surface the photos that are already in your community and offer users engaging new ways to discover and explore visual content.
• Lightbox photo viewer: Magnify the image you’re viewing and browse similar images. Give individual images kudos.
• Masonry message view: An image-rich component for presenting topic threads. Great for use in forums where engaging images are shared often.
• Completely redesigned photo uploader: Quickly and easily upload multiple image files with instant preview, inline captioning, and more.
• Photo captioning: Annotate photos as you upload them. Captions add commentary within messages, in the lightbox viewer, and within photo albums.
• Message editor toolbar facelift: We’ve made the Photos button easier to find for users contributing images as well as other enhancements.
• Image attachment migration: This optional tool enables you to convert all existing attached images for inline display.

Note: Media Experience is enabled for all interaction styles with the following exceptions:

• Partially enabled for Blogs: The new uploader and lightbox are active in Blogs, and you can use the photo engagement components to highlight images from blog nodes. However, the Masonry View, when applied to a blog node, ignores teaser content.
• Partially enabled for Contests: While photo engagement components can be used to promote a Contest, the Masonry view does not show a voting control for each entry – a user has to click in to vote. Also, the uploader and lightbox are not active.
• Not supported in Ratings & Reviews.

We highlight a portion of the new features, components, and configuration tasks in these Release Notes, but recommend that you check out the complete Media Experience documentation.

Before upgrading to Media Experience 

Before moving to Media Experience, be aware that we have made significant feature enhancements and changes to the way that media is treated. These are packaged for you as “version 4” of our “Media” feature within Studio.

Important: It's technically possible to adopt Media v4 and then revert back to previous versions, however we do not recommend it. Most changes revert gracefully, but some will not:

• Media v4 introduces photo captions. Media v3 photos do not support captions, and so any created under Media v4 might be orphaned or lost if you revert to Media v3.
• Media v4 gives you the option to migrate photo file attachments to inline images. If you go back to Media v3 after migrating attachments to inline images, they will stay as inline images.

As always, it's important to review thoroughly the feature changes in your staging environment before going to production. Consult your Lithium Customer Success Manager if you have any questions.

 

Learn more about what’s changing with Media v4 and things to consider before upgrading.

Enable and configure Media Experience

To take advantage of the new Media Experience features, you must enable Media v4 in Studio and then change some global configuration settings.

Turn on Media v4 in Studio

To enable the new Media Experience:

1. Go to Studio > Features.
2. Open the Media feature-version menu and select 4.
   
   
   
3. Click Save.

After you enable Media v4, we recommend you:

• Review and adjust image upload options
• Learn about the new Media Experience components and add them to your community pages.
• Position the message editor tabs at the bottom of the message editor
• Migrate your existing image attachments to inline images.

Review and adjust image upload options

Since Media Experience brings images more to the forefront on your community, you should review and adjust your existing image-related Admin settings.

There is a master switch in the Community Admin for enabling photo upload. (This is probably already enabled, but it’s worth making sure.) Also, your max file size might be too low; we recommend raising this to the maximum value of 5120 kilobytes to support the current hi-resolution photo standards. We also recommend increasing the number of images users can upload.

 

Set your image upload options:

1. Go to Admin > Features > Images.
2. Select the Turn on Image Upload.
3. Set the Maximum allowed file size for upload (KB) value to 5120.
4. Increase the Maximum number of uploaded images per user value to 1000. (If needed, you can set this value higher, up to 10,000.)
   

   Note: By default, users are limited to the value you set here. If you want to grant specific users the ability to upload more images than the limit imposed here, you can grant them Bypass image upload limit under Community Admin > Users > Permissions, in the Images permissions group.

5. Ensure that the Image file extensions for upload includes these values: *.jpg;*.JPG;*.jpeg;*.JPEG;*.gif;*.GIF;*.png;*.PNG;*.webp;*.WEBP
6. Click Save.

 

Prevent image file types from being added as file attachments.

Attaching an image file as a paperclip icon under a post is not the optimal way to share photos, but some users still do this out of habit. To help steer them toward inline photo upload, we recommend reserving the file attachments feature for other files which cannot be uploaded inline, like Office documents, .ZIP files, and such.

1. Go to Admin > System > File Attachments.
2. In the File extensions for attachments list, remove any mention of jpg, jpeg, gif, or png.
3. Click Save.

 

Implement the new auto-detect setting that determines which album to upload images to.

We recently introduced the ability to route users’ photos to their hidden album automatically when they are posting images to a non-public area of the community. This helps prevent sensitive images from being widely seen.

Note: Images stored in users’ hidden albums are not shown in any of the engagement components.

1. Go to Admin > Features > Images.
2. If needed, change the scope from the top-level community page to a specific page in the Settings For option.
3. In the Default user album to place uploaded image field, select Use Default (Auto Detect).
4. Click Save.

 

Turn on EXIF rotation to ensure that all photo uploads are displayed right-side-up.

Modern cameras and smartphones know whether they were tilted at 90 degrees when a photo was taken, and they save this portrait/landscape orientation as an EXIF tag on the image. To ensure that these rotations are respected, enable this setting.

Note: Uploaded images are force-rotated and resaved, after which all EXIF metadata on the images are discarded. Do not use this setting if you want to preserve EXIF tags on uploaded images for later use.

1. Go to Admin > Features > Images.
2. Select the Strip exif orientation metadata option.
3. Click Save.

About the new Media Experience Components

Media Experience includes a new suite of components for you to use on your community pages. Some of these components can replace the existing components from previous versions of Media, as follows:

Component Name	Scope	Replaces
Latest Photos	Node	Community Images
Latest Photos in Node	Node, Category, Board	No previous equivalent
Topic Photos	Thread	No previous equivalent
My Photos	Profile	My Images
Masonry Message List	NA	Alternative to message-list
Top Photo Contributors	Node	No previous equivalent
Top Kudoed Photos	Node	No previous equivalent

 

Note: Notice that two components are replaced with new versions. Specifically, Community Images is replaced by Latest Photos, and My Images is replaced by My Photos.

 

Learn about all the new media-related components.

 

When you move to Media v4, you do not need to go to each page in Studio and swap out the old component for the new one; we’ve done that heavy lifting for you. In fact, after you move to Media v4, all of your components will be converted to their Media v4 equivalent, and the previous versions of the components will no longer appear in Studio.

Tip: To see where you are currently using these components on your pages, open the component’s hovercard help in Studio and view the Where am I using this? section:

Learn about adding components to your community pages.

Position the message editor tabs

Media Experience includes a more modern looking toolbar for the message editor.

 

In addition to having a cleaner presentation style, the Photos and Video icons have been given more visual prominence to encourage members to upload more media content.

Important: Lithium considers the updated toolbar a best practice for media-focused communities. If you have customized your toolbar, you will see the updated button icons, but the Photos and Videos buttons will not be in the new location in the toolbar. Contact Lithium Support to integrate our updates with your customizations.

Additionally, you can now specify whether the editing tabs (Rich Text, HTML, Preview) for the text editor appear above or below the message editor.

Note: You can configure this setting at the community, board, or category level. We recommend configuring the tabs to display below the message window so that the editing toolbar appears less cluttered.

 

 

To set the location of the message editor tabs:

1. Go to Community Admin > Posts & Topics > Settings.
2. (Optional) Click Choose and navigate to the category or board you want to configure.
3. For the Display Rich Text, HTML, and Preview tabs setting, select Above Message Editor or Below Message Editor, as needed. (The community default is Above Message Editor.)
4. Click Save.

The new image uploader

The new Lithium media uploader streamlines the media upload workflow and creates a better user experience compared to our previous uploader.

The new media uploader:

• Revamps the entire media upload workflow for inline or attached images
• Supports dragging and dropping of images into the uploader
• Enables members to upload multiple images at a time
• Provides a richer image preview experience
• Enables members to add captions

The media uploader is integrated into all discussion styles (forums, blogs, TKBs, etc.) where members can insert images. Members can insert photos in three ways:

• Upload: Choose files from your local machine to upload to the community.
• Web Address (URL): Enter a URL for an image on a remote machine.
• Saved Photos: Choose files that have already been uploaded to the community.

 

Chosen images preview in Photos. The member can click Add a caption to add a short image description.

 

 

Members can choose the Size (Small, Medium, Large) and Position (Left, Center, Right) settings for the image. The Format area previews how the image will look on the page.

 

 

Learn more about the new image uploader and its available options.

Image handling and lightbox viewer

Media Experience includes several improvements to how we handle and display images:

• New lightbox viewer
• Image hover affordances
• Attached images displayed as thumbnails, not links
• User’s attached images stored in a browseable album

Lightbox viewer

To enhance the image-viewing experience, when you click any thumbnail attachment or inline image, the image opens up in a theater-style lightbox.

 

 

In this magnified view, you can scroll through the image library (by clicking the left and right arrows or using your keyboard arrows) to see other images in the same discussion thread. You can also give kudos to individual images or flag them as inappropriate content to site moderators.

Inline image hover affordances

Now, when you hover over an inline image, you see icons that you can click to perform specific actions, depending on what you’re doing. For example, if you are reading a thread and hover over an image, you can click the magnifying glass icon that appears to open the image in the lightbox:

 

 

Or, if you are editing an article and hover over of the inline images, you can click the pencil icon to edit aspects of the image:

If you’ve viewing an image in a user’s profile view or album, you can click the Topic icon to go to the thread/location of that image:

 

 

Note: If you have permission to manage images in the album, you can also click the X icon to delete the image.

Use the new Masonry component to make images pop

Visually rich areas of a community call for a visually appealing presentation. The new Masonry view presents much of the same content as the classic board view, but treats the images as the focal point.

 

 

Note: This component is intended to be an alternative to the message-list component. You should not use both the Masonry Message List and the message-list components on the same page.

 

To use the Masonry view on one of your boards:

1. Go to Studio > Page.
2. Next to Page Type, click Choose.
   
   
   
   
3. Open folders and click the page you want to add the Masonry component to.
4. In the Components list, open the Media folder and click Masonry Message List.
   
   
   

   
   Important: When adding the component to a board-level page, such as Forum Page, Blog Page, or TKB Page, add the component below the menu-bar component. The menu-bar component adds the New Message button and Options menu to the page quilt.

   Tip: Make a note of the current components on the page and the order they appear in the layout in case you need to revert your changes.

   When adding the component to a board-level page, remove the following components if they exist on the quilt: message-list, reply-filter, paging, articles, submissions, ideas.

5. Click Save.

Learn more about the other new Media Experience components.

Migrate existing attachments to inline images

When you upgrade to Media version 4, all of your uploaded images will display inline in the body of the message, not as attachments. To enable you to provide a consistent viewing experience for all images across your community, we have provided a migration tool so you can convert your existing attached images to inline images.

Note: After you’ve converted an image attachment to an inline image, you cannot change it back to an attachment.

This one-time, batch conversion runs as a background process and converts all past image attachments to live “media objects” in each user’s attachment album. Converted attachments show up as thumbnail previews in messages where they’re attached and become true site images that can earn kudos, live in albums, and show up in site modules like “My Photos” and “Latest Photos.”

Basically, we change your image attachments presentation from this:

 

 

To this:

 

Note: If you have enabled the Admin > System > File Attachments > Render attachments as HTML images setting, we highly recommend migrating your image attachments. If you have this setting enabled, you probably have lots of images added as attachments. These attachments cannot be shown in the new Photos in this Topic or My Photos components on member profiles. Migrating them to inline images enables these images to live on your site as fully realized images. (Also, the Render attachments as HTML images setting is removed in Media v4.)

 

To convert your community images from attachments to inline images:

1. Go to Community Admin > System > Image Attachment Migration.
2. On the Control tab, choose whether the converted images should be placed as thumbnails at the top or bottom of the associated message.
   
   
   
   
3. Click Start Migration.
   Note: Non-image attachments are not migrated. Only .jpg, .jpeg, .gif, .png, .webp, .tiff, and .bmp files are converted.
4. To monitor the migration process, click the Progress tab.
   
   
   
   
5. To see the details for any images that failed to be migrated, click the Failures tab.
   
   
   

Best Practices for Photo Placement and Encouraging Users to Upload Photos

When turning on Media Experience, you want to make sure that you and your community members get the most out of it. As such, here are some tips and deployment recommendations to consider:

Post an announcement to the community
To encourage members to begin sharing images, you’ll need to let them know that this feature is now available for them to use. Use this opportunity to highlight some of the new and improved media features and encourage them to start uploading new images.

Make the new media components highly visible
To increase visibility and engagement with the new media components, we recommend including the new Media Experience components on these key community pages:

Create a new badge for photos
If you have Premium Gamification, consider creating a badge specifically to encourage users to contribute photo content.

Send emails to members on new leaderboards
When you add the new Top Photos and Top Photo Contributors components to your pages, take note of the members who now populate this list. Consider sending them a personal message to let them know about their position on the new leaderboard.

Lithium AngularJS Integration Support

Lithium Community version 15.6 introduced Document Viewer, the first Lithium feature implemented with AngularJS. In 15.10, we’ve announced our second Angular-based feature: Media Experience (Media v4).

Lithium’s Angular app (li-community), like any Angular-based app, has a scope, loads certain AngularJS libraries, and must be initialized.

If your community has customizations that use AngularJS on Community pages, an on-site developer, Lithium partner, or Lithium Services team member must make some code-level changes so that both your custom Angular app and the Lithium Angular app are initialized (or bootstrapped) correctly. Read Integrating custom Angular apps with Lithium Community for instructions to integrate your Angular app with Lithium’s li-community app.

If you are unsure whether your community uses AngularJS, the article provides a script to test for custom Angular code.

Ratings and Reviews enhancements: Multidimensional Reviews

You can now define aspects of a product category so that customers can provide an overall rating of a product, as well as be able to rate individual dimensions of a product, such as “Fit” or “Comfort” for a shoe. You can define up to five dimensions per product category in Community Admin > Features > Products > Category Editor. Products within that category inherit the dimensions.  Dimensions are rated on a 1-5 star scale.

Review dimensions are seen and rated in the Product Reviews ActiveCast widget (see image below). Each review dimension is a unique, ratable entity and does not affect the overall product 1-5 star rating value.

For more details, see Create a review dimension.

 

Product dimensions can also be created with the Community API v2. 

View dimensional review data in LSI

LSI includes new Ratings and Reviews reports so you can analyze how your customers rate your products overall, or by specific product dimensions, described above. You can look at dimensional review data in many ways (by total number of reviews, specific products, by specific review dimensions, and by users).   

 

To run Ratings and Reviews reports:

1. Sign in to LSI.
2. Click the Ratings and Reviews tab.
3. Click Products.

Results for collected product reviews are displayed:

 

 

To see data for specific products, click the product in the product list (or create a product filter in the Advanced filters).

 

 

To see which users have written reviews, the average star rating they provided, and how many reviews each user has written, click the Users tab:

 

Ratings and Reviews API Updates

We’ve added new resources to the Community API v2 to support dimensional reviews.

• Review_Dimension: a specific dimension of a product category, such as Arch Support or Comfort for a shoe in a Shoes product category
• Review_Dimension_Rating: the rating value given to a review dimension

We’ve also added a related review_dimensions field on the  Review resource to retrieve review dimension information in a LiQL query.

 

With Community API v2 you can:

• Create, delete, and retrieve review dimensions
• Create, update, and retrieve reviews
• Create, update, and retrieve review dimension ratings

SEO enhancements

Harnessing user-generated content on your website is one of the best ways to optimize SEO. Lithium Communities are rich with user-generated content that helps your boost SEO, enabling users to find answers to their questions faster. As a result, we continue to invest in advanced capabilities to keep pace with Google and other search algorithms so that your users can discover content quickly and easily.

In Release 15.9, we introduced improved metadata descriptions and title tag optimization. This release introduces another series of enhancements to improve click-through rates and enable crawlers to search sites more effectively. SEO is baked into the Community Platform, meaning you don’t need to do anything to take advantage of it and you automatically receive these enhancements.

Set the website name to display when posting community links on Facebook

You can now define the website name that displays below community links pasted into Facebook. Specifically, you are defining the “og:site_name” property in the metatag. The website name you enter here is used in your Facebook link preview, as shown in this example:

 

 

To define the website name to use when posting a community link on Facebook:

1. Go to Community Admin > System > SEO.
2. Enter the community website URL (up to 200 characters) you want to display when a link to your community is pasted into Facebook.
   
   
   
   
3. Click Save.

New config to have thread replies tagged as H2s instead of H1s

We have added a new config (Use H2 tags for thread replies) so you can have the initial message in a thread use an H1 tag, but have each of the thread replies use the H2 tag. Before this config option, both the initial message and all replies had the H1 tag, which results in too many H1 tags on a single page, muddying SEO results.

The Use H2 tags for thread replies config option is enabled by default. If you need this config option disabled, contact Lithium Support.

Support for manually overriding a blog article’s canonical URL

We have added the ability for permissioned users to manually override the canonical URL for individual blog articles. This capability is provided with the Manage any article permission and is granted to Admins and Moderators by default. You can use canonical (or “preferred”) URLs to prevent duplicate content issues and improve SEO when the same content is accessed through multiple URLs.

Learn more about using canonical URLs to improve link and ranking signals.

 

To edit the canonical URL for a blog article:

1. Sign in to the community as an Admin or Moderator (or user with the Manage any article permission).
2. Go to a blog article and click Edit Article.
3. Edit the URL in the Canonical URL field:
   
   
   
   
4. Click Post.

Note: If the blog article is later moved to a different board, these canonical values are carried with the article and are not changed.

Lithium-Klout SDK

In 15.4, we introduced the open beta program for the Lithium-Klout SDK. After several months of working closely with developers and partners and collecting their feedback to improve community development experience, we are proud to announce that the Lithium-Klout SDK is now in General Availability.

 

Note: The SDK does not support Mobile v2.

 

This tool is an alternative to Studio and gives developers direct access to your community's Studio and SDK plugins (the directory structures containing customization resources), enabling you to build customizations and integrations for the Lithium Community platform using your favorite tools and common workflows. It provides a more efficient workflow and makes it easier for your team to collaborate more effectively.

If you have developers or technical resources onsite and are planning a new project, such as a community redesign or new component, then the SDK is the ideal tool for you to create a uniquely branded community experience for your users.

Using the Lithium-Klout SDK you can:

• Choose to develop in Mac or Linux environments
• Export existing customizations from Studio (components, endpoints, skins, and so on) into the SDK plugin for easier development and source control
• Clear assets created in Studio from the Studio plugin to keep source code for more technical customizations such as components, endpoints, and macros in the SDK plugin
• Develop independently of Studio in your preferred IDE and upload customizations to the stage server via the command line
• Contribute the following plugin points:
• Assets, badge icons, and rank icons
• Components
• CSS and SCSS
• Endpoints
• Layouts
• Macros
• Page Initialization script (common.init)
• Quilts
• Skins
• Text strings

For an introduction into the tool, an installation guide and tutorial documentation, the Lithium-Klout SDK doc portal is actively maintained to facilitate a smooth developer experience.

API changes

Community API v2 Create, Update, and Delete Calls over HTTP

Released as Open Beta.

 

We are releasing our first set of Create, Update, and Delete calls for Community API v2. Up to now, you have been restricted to Return calls using the /search endpoint. Community API v2 is an evolving API. Look for additional Create/Update/Delete support in future releases.

• Review_Dimension: Create and Delete supported
• Review: Create and Update supported
• Image: Create and Delete kudos and abuse reports for an image
• Message: Create a message and Create/Delete kudos for a message is supported. See LINK to TKB
• User: Create and Update supported

Before making any call using HTTP POST, PUT, or DELETE, call the /allowed endpoint (see below) to ensure that the current user is allowed to perform the action.

Community API v2 /allowed endpoint

Released as Open Beta.

 

Use the /allowed endpoint to perform permission verification before making Community API v2 Create, Update, and Delete calls.

The /allowed endpoint takes an HTTP method and path as parameters and verifies whether the current user is allowed to perform the action.

See details in The /allowed endpoint: Verifying a user can perform an action.

New Community API V2 Resources

15.10 introduces the following new API v2 resources.

• Review_Dimension
• Review_Dimension_Rating

Updated Community API v2 Resources

The following resources have new fields:

• Review: new fields: review_dimensions
• Board: new fields: depth, position, nested
• Prodcut Category: new fields: product_parent_category.id, has_parent_category_id

Community API V2 Changes

Image.id now maps to the display ID for the image instead of the unique ID. This also applies to images.id in the WHERE clause for queries on the Messages and Kudos collections.

 

Session Key required for Community API v1 Calls

As of 15.10, a session key is required when making direct calls to Community API v1. This affects how you test API v1 calls and how you make direct calls via AJAX outside of an endpoint. See API session key authentication for details.

Badge enhancements

In addition to the recent badge enhancements announced in the 15.9 Release, you can now use the badge rule builder to create badges based on:

• Consecutive signins
  
• Signin date and Registration date
  
  

Improvements to the Float Accepted Solutions feature

In the 15.7 Release, we introduced the ability to float Accepted Solutions to the top of the thread. Previously, to use this feature you had to:

• Use linear layout (as opposed to topic/threaded layout).
• Use the message-list component on the ForumTopicPage quilt.

With the 15.10 Release, you can now display floated solutions in threaded view when using the message-list-details-with-inline-editors or message-list components.

Examples

Floated Solution in threaded view for message-list-details-with-inline-editors component:

Floated solution in threaded view in themessage-list component:

Spam reporting support for private messages

We have added to ability for users to report spam or abuse received in private messages. Reporting spam/abuse in private messages works exactly the same as it does for other community content. The user just clicks the Report Inappropriate Content option to report the message.

When a private message is flagged, depending on the settings in the recipients tab, moderators receive either a PM, email, or both to review the inappropriate content. Moderators can also view all reported private messages in the specific board your Admin sets up to receive these reports.

To set which board receives the private message spam/abuse reports:

1. Go to Community Admin > Mod Tools > Abuse Notification.
2. In the Board ID for private message abuse reports field, enter the ID for the board where you want all private message abuse reports to go.
   
   
   
   
3. Click Save.

Advanced tab in Studio

With the Lithium-Klout SDK now in General Availability, we added advanced functionality in Studio to ensure a seamless workflow between your Community Admins and developers or partners.

The Page Initialization and SDK tabs have been moved from the main Studio menu and into the new, top-level Advanced tab. The Advanced tab also contains the new Robots Editor where you can edit your robots.txt file. Permissions for the SDK and Page Initialization tab remain the same as in previous Studio versions. There is a new permission to “Manage robots exclusion protocol” in the Studio section of Community Admin > Users > Permissions.  

 

Robots Exclusion Protocol Editor in Studio

Lithium Studio now includes a Robots Editor tab in Studio to define how robots crawl and index pages in the community. Prior to 15.10, editing the Robots Exclusion Protocol file (robots.txt) required Lithium Support. You can now edit the file directly in Studio > Advanced > Robots Editor. Note that there is a new “Manage robots exclusion protocol” permission in the Studio section of Community Admin > Users > Permissions that enables a user to edit the file.

For more information about the exclusion file and how to define your exclusion protocol, see Robots.txt and Exclude content from search using robots.txt.

FreeMarker support

Lithium now supports FreeMarker version 2.3.23. For details about new FreeMarker features added, see FreeMarker.org.

You Found It. We Fixed It.

• We have fixed the issue where avatar images uploaded in Studio were having their top, left, and bottom edges cropped. Uploaded avatar images now display the whole image.
• Previously, when you tried to send a group message to a list of more than 3072 recipients, you received an exception error; this issue has been fixed.
• We have fixed the issue where the Facebook registration metric was not incrementing when Simple registration was enabled.
• Previously, when you set the option to Show top-level categories in breadcrumb links, the category name mistakenly appeared twice in the breadcrumb. This display issue has been fixed.