The 15.9 Release introduces the new Lithium Responsive platform. Lithium Responsive optimizes your community for a wide range of devices from mobile phones to tablets to desktop monitors. Using Lithium Responsive, you can provide a consistent and modern brand and user experience everywhere, ensuring a feature-rich community on all devices. Customer demand has been high for this feature, and we cannot accommodate all customers at this time.
The 15.9 release also includes several other productivity and search optimization improvements, including the ability for moderators to add a reason explaining why they are editing, moving, or deleting messages and send an email notifying users of the action taken. To help with SEO, we’ve added the ability to customize title tags for community pages and have enhanced our metadata descriptions so when threads that have accepted solutions are returned in search results, it is clearly indicated that the issue is “Solved”.

Other improvements include a new setting to prevent people from giving kudos to implemented Ideas and support for several more criteria you can use to create community badges.

Finally, we’ve cleaned-up and improved several of the Community Admin settings so that it’s much clearer what each state of the setting does.

New features and enhancements

• Lithium Responsive
• Reason notification option added to message moderation workflow
• Improved metadata descriptions to indicate when threads have been marked with accepted solutions
• Title tag optimization for SEO
• Prevent users from giving kudos to completed ideas and contests
• Support for new criteria for badge rules
• Text improvements to several Community Admin settings
• API changes

Lithium Responsive

This year, Lithium has been working hard to migrate the Community product to a responsive web design platform. The 15.9 release marks the first of several launches on this new platform and the start of an evolving user experience journey.

Customers engage with your Lithium Community throughout the day whether they are on the go or relaxing at home. They can start a conversation on their laptop and continue it on their mobile device while waiting in line for coffee. Our goal is to adapt your customers’ Community experience seamlessly across devices so that they can connect when they want, wherever they are. Lithium Responsive, our responsive user experience solution, optimizes your community for a wide range of devices from mobile phones to tablets to desktop monitors. Using Lithium Responsive, you can provide a consistent brand and user experience everywhere, ensuring a feature-rich community on all devices.  

There are many exciting technologies coming together for this product, and we want to ensure that you have the best possible experience. For this reason, adopting Lithium Responsive must be done in cooperation with Lithium Professional Services.

Note: Customer demand has been high and we cannot accommodate all customers at this time. If you are interested in moving to a responsive solution, contact your Account Manager for more information.

Reason notification option added to message moderation workflow

Site content moderators sometimes need to take action on user content by moving, editing, and deleting user messages. Reasons for these actions can vary, from better site content organization to corrective action on inappropriate content. Up to now, communication to users about the reason for the action taken on their messages could be a bit hit and miss, since it relied on moderators completing a few extra steps to ensure proper communication.

To simplify this process and improve communication of these moderation actions, we have added a “Reason” section to the appropriate pages when moderators (or any user with the new Send reason notifications permission) attempt to move, edit, or delete messages.

Now, when a user with the Send reason notifications permission edits, moves, or deletes a message, a new reason notification area appears:

The moderator can opt to notify different groups of people about the change being made and enter custom text that provides as much detail as they want. The Reason and Explanation text is then added to the email notification sent to the chosen recipients.

The availability of the reason area is controlled by the Send reason notifications user permission. We recommend granting this permission, which is denied by default, to your community Admins and Moderators.

Note: The reason notification workflow/notifications feature is not enabled by default. Contact Lithium Support to have this feature enabled for your community.

To grant the reason box moderation permission:

1. Go to Community Admin > Users > Permissions.
2. Scroll down to the Moderation section.
   
3. Grant the Send reason notifications permission.
   
4. Click Save.

To use the new reason notification workflow:

1. Sign in to the community as a member with the Send reason notifications permission.
   
2. Go to the message or reply you want to edit, move, or delete.
3. Open the Options menu and choose the appropriate action.
4. In the reason section, choose the people who should be notified about this change.
   Note: Recipient options include Author of thread, Recent participants in thread, Author of destination thread (Move only), and All participants in the destination thread (Move only).
5. Enter the Reason and Explanation. The text you enter here is used in the email notification sent to the indicated recipients.

Each recipient receives an email that indicates the message impacted and the action taken. If you want, you can edit the source content of the email template in Studio, just like any other email template. The “from” address is the same as all other system emails.

To view and edit the source content of the new Moderation reason notification email template:

1. Go to Studio > Text Editor > Email Text.
2. Open the Select Email Template menu and select the Moderation reason notification option.
   
3. Click View.
4. Review and edit, if necessary, the email template text to your liking.
   Note: Do not edit or remove the Reason and Explanation lines.
   
   These lines are automatically populated with the Reason and Explanation text you entered when you edited, moved, or deleted the message.
5. Click Save.

Improved metadata descriptions to indicate when threads have been marked with accepted solutions

We have enhanced the descriptions in the metadata for our topics so that when people perform searches (for example, on Google), the results returned by the search engine indicate when the question/thread is “Solved”.

With this optimization, threads with accepted solutions will be clearly indicated, hopefully resulting in people being more inclined to click through to view the thread on your community.

Here’s what’s changed:

Before this enhancement, the metadata below the <title> tag looked like this:

 

Now, when a thread is marked as solution, the metadata includes much more information, including user-facing search results text to indicate that the thread is solved:

 

There is nothing you need to do to get the benefit of this improvement. It’s all done for you behind the scenes.

Title tag optimization for SEO

Admins can now make it easier for search engines to find and categorize community pages by defining unique PAGE TITLE tags in the header of each page/URL.

To take full advantage of this tag (based on how search engines, like Google, process and display search results), title tags are limited to 60 characters. We highly recommend you make the tags for each node unique and include your brand name in the title.

Note: If you do not enter a value in this field, Lithium creates one using the node name and brand name (for example, “Node title – Brand name”).

To enter a page’s Title tag text that appears in web search results:

1. Go to Community Admin > System > SEO.
2. In the Text for the Title tag in Page header field, enter a unique text string (up to 60 characters).
   
3. Click Save.

Support for new criteria for badge rules

We’ve added several new badging criteria options that you can use when creating community badges. Many of these new badge options pertain to member-related activities. The new badge criteria include:

• Changed profile avatar: Award a badge when a member changes their profile avatar from the default image with an uploaded, external image.
• Number of signins: Award badges based on the number of times members sign in to the community over a specific time period.
• Message views: Award badges based on the number of messages members view over a specific period of time.
• (Advanced editor only) Registration date: Award badges based on when people registered with your community.
• (Advanced editor only) Sign-in date: Award badges based on member sign-in activity during a specific date range.
• (Advanced editor only) Time since registration: Award “anniversary” badges based on when members registered for your community. Values can be in days, months, or years.

Learn more about creating new badges and view the full list of supported badge criteria.

Prevent users from giving kudos on completed Ideas

We have added a new setting for Idea Exchanges so you can prevent people from giving kudos to Ideas that have a status of completed. Enabling this setting locks down the kudos granted to an idea when the idea is marked with a “Completed” status.

To prevent users from giving kudos to completed ideas:

1. Go to Community Admin > Discussion Styles > Ideas.
2. Select Prevent users from giving kudos on completed Ideas.
   
3. Click Save.

When enabled, members will not be able to kudo completed Ideas:

Text improvements for several Community Admin settings

In our ongoing effort to make our community management tools easier to use, we recently completed a review of our community admin settings that were a bit confusing. Specifically, there were several settings where you enabled or disabled the setting by clicking a checkbox. For example, the Posts & Topics checkbox option “Use the Rich Text Editor by default” was confusing since it wasn’t clear what the non-checked setting implied.

To make these settings more clear, we have converted over a dozen of these checkboxes to radio button choices. In the example above, the setting now appears as:

 

Note: None of these changes will impact existing settings on your community; all of your current settings are retained.

The following table lists before and after text for the setting labels we improved.

Admin Page	Previous Checkbox Text	New Radio Button Text
Posts & Topics > Settings	Use the Rich Text Editor tab by default	Default editor to use for posts ·       Rich Text Editor ·       HTML Editor
Posts & Topics > Settings	Default reply subject line is "Re: <previous subject>"	Default subject line to use in replies ·       Re: <previous subject> ·       Empty
Posts & Topics > Settings	View topics immediately after posting	After posting a topic, take user to the ·       Topic page ·       Board that topic is contained in
Posts & Topics > Topics Display	Sort topics by time of most recent post	Sort topics by ·       Time of most recent post ·       Original posting date
TKB > Settings	Let designated contributors publish articles	Users who can edit TKB articles ·       Author and any contributors promoted to Assistant Publisher ·       Author only
TKB > Settings	Grant kudos on TKB articles to the article's original owner	Grant kudos on TKB articles to ·       The article's original author ·       No one
Blogs	Show full name of blog authors	For blog authors, show name as ·       Full name and user name ·       User name only
Mobile	Use Community Wide Search	Set default search scope to ·       Entire community ·       Just the current discussion style (Forum, Blog, TKB, etc.)
Mobile	Use mobile view for tablets	When viewing the community on a tablet, use ·       Mobile view ·       Desktop view
Mobile	Show community announcement on all pages	Show announcements on mobile devices on ·       Node, Category, and Community pages ·       Community home page only
Mobile	Display images in page	Display images in posts ·       Inline in the message body ·       As separate from the message body
Private Messages	Show both read and unread private messages	In the community page Private Message component, show ·       Read and unread messages ·       Unread messages only
Private Messages	Use Token Input for Private Messages	Enter user names ·       From a pop-up list (Token Input) ·       As a comma-separated list of user names
System > Date & Time	Use Relative Dates (three hours ago)	Display dates as ·       Relative dates (e.g. three hours ago) ·       Absolute dates (e.g. Nov-15-1966)
System > RSS	Use the teaser for the RSS feed content	Content to use for RSS feeds ·       Teaser or body ·       Always body
System > File Attachments	Make all attachments public	Set attachment access to ·       Public ·       Private
User > Profile Defaults	Display names with last name first	Display names as ·       Last Name, First Name ·       First Name, Last Name
User > Profile Defaults	Show both online and offline friends in My Friends component	In the My Friends component, show ·       All friends (online and offline) ·       Online friends only

 

API Changes

The following API changes have been added for 15.9.

!= constraint now supported on Board and Category v2 collections

We now support queries that that filter out a specific board or category.

For example:

SELECT * FROM boards WHERE id != ‘board1’

SELECT * FROM categories WHERE id != ‘category1’

Review Invitation API to generate tokenized URLs

In 15.4, we added a feature that enables you to send invitations to users to write a product review. This feature supported a manual process for uploading email addresses and product IDs in a CSV file to Community Admin, and then Community Admin would generate a list of tokenized URLs to send to your users that included the invitation.

We added an API that generates tokenized URLs in addition to the Community Admin workflow. This feature is supported from 15.5 and later. The APIs require OAuth 2.0 for authentication.

For full details, see Invite users to write a product review.

New Components

New Klout Connect Component for Mobile v1

We’ve added a new component you can place onto Mobile v1 quilts that enables community members to connect their community account to their Klout account. When they connect their profiles, the actions they take on your community influence their overall Klout score and topic expertise.

You can find the component in the Klout section of the components list in Studio > Page. You can use the component on any Mobile quilt. Mobile quilts begin with “Mobile,” such as Mobile Community Page or Mobile Category Page.

You Found It. We Fixed It.

• We identified that notifications and subscriptions were sometimes lost due to network and other unknown issues. We’ve rectified this behavior by adding a layer of redundancy to our framework, enabling us to store and resend notifications/subscriptions that might not have been sent.
• We have fixed the Number of days to wait before sending reminder email setting under Admin > Features > Accepted Solutions so that it now accepts integers between 1 and 30. Previously, you received an error if you entered a number less than 7.
• We have fixed the issue where URLs pasted into private messages were being converted to plain text. Now, the URL is pasted correctly and retains the link.
• We have fixed the issue where links added to knowledge base articles were not clickable.
• Previously, if you copied or bookmarked the URL for a non-first page of a thread (for example, the third page of posts in a thread) and then tried to go to that page, but the page was no longer there (posts were removed so that the third page was no longer needed), you would see a blank page. Now, instead, you are taken to the last active page in the thread.
• You no longer get an error when you try to send a test email to yourself in Studio for the Answer accepted as solution or Kudos notification email templates.
• We have fixed the issue where the maximum character length for the badge description field was not being respected based on the value entered in the input.cfg file. Now, if you enter a value more than the 150-character default, this value is respected when entering a description while creating a badge.
• We have fixed the issue where your metrics_summary_report notification was not delivered, if your default language was set to Finnish.
• Previously, if you were using the Mondrian skin and had a numbered list that exceeded 9 steps, the double-digit numbers would get cut off. We have fixed this display issue and now all numbered steps appear correctly.
• We have fixed the issue where you could not filter your community search for Private Messages, if you had top-level categories enabled on your community site. Previously, in these cases, the Private Messages option did not display in the search drop-down menu; now it does.
• Anonymous users can no longer submit multiple reviews from an account with the same email address.