The 23.3 Release marks Aurora’s Initial Market Offer release. In conjunction with reaching this milestone, we have moved the Aurora documentation and Release Notes from it’s private location to a customer-facing location on Atlas. Moving forward, you can find Aurora-related information as follows:

• Release Notes
• Documentation
• Discussion Boards
• Ideas

We recommend subscribing to these areas to keep up to date on everything Aurora.

The 23.3 Release includes several enhancements to the Member and Administrator experiences, including the ability to ban members, control registration settings, edit your Terms of Service, and view dashboards and reports with Aurora Analytics.

Member Experience

New default avatar collection

Aurora now provides out-of-the-box avatars that members can choose from when selecting their community avatar.

To select an avatar from the collection:

1. Open the Account menu and click Settings.
2. On the Personal tab, click the edit icon located on your current avatar.
3. On the Edit Avatar window, select one of the default avatar options provided  in the Select an avatar area.
   
4. Click Save.

Tag notifications

In previous releases, you were able to follow and unfollow specific tags. With this release, you will now receive email and in-app notifications relating to tags you follow.

Learn more about following tags and how to manage your follows and notifications.

Administration Experience

Ban Members

From time to time, you might have community members who ignore your site guidelines or exhibit malicious behavior. In these cases, you might need to ban them from the community.

The quickest way to ban a member is to go to their profile page, open the Options menu, and click Ban Member. 

You’ll be prompted to fill in a few fields, like the duration of the ban and the reason for banning this member.

Then, click Ban.

The banned member is immediately signed out of the community.

Note: If you ban a member by mistake or decide later to remove the ban, you can unban the person.

You can also ban a member from their post or reply if that content contains malicious content. For example, someone may be spamming your members or selling other products. In these cases, open the Options menu and click Ban Member.

Or, you can ban members from the Manage Content dashboard, if that’s where you discovered the malicious content.

Finally, Aurora also enables you to ban individual members or groups of members from the Users dashboard by creating ban rules. 

To ban members with a ban rule: 

1. Open your Account menu and go to Manage > Users.
   The Banned tab on the Manage Users page opens by default. 
2. Click Create Ban Rule.
   

    

3. Fill out this form to target the member or members you want to ban. 

For example, let’s say you found several fake members who all had “@badcompany” in their email address. In the Email Address field, enter “*@badcompany.com”. 

You can further refine your rule using the Username, User ID, or IP address fields. 

Then, you can set whether the rule needs to meet all of the criteria you’ve set or only some of it. If you want to ban everyone who meets any of the criteria you’ve set, select the Match any of the above criteria checkbox.

You can set the duration for this ban. The duration can be temporary or permanent as required. To set a custom duration, select Custom from the drop-down menu and set the duration.

In Ban Reasons, specify the reasons for the ban and then click Ban. You can enter both an internal (only for admins and moderators to see) and an external reason (a public reason visible to everyone on the community). All impacted members are banned and signed out of the community.

Learn more about banning members.

Add Avatar permission

As an admin, you can manage permissions for avatars. The permission that enables a member to upload their own avatar is enabled by default to all community members.

To manage the ability for community members to upload their own avatar:

1. Go to the Roles and Permissions page for the community.
2. Beside Community Permissions Defaults, click Edit.
3. In the left column, click Member Profiles.
4. In the Member Profiles section, beside Add avatar, select Deny or Grant as required.
   

Unless you have specified different permissions for certain roles, this selection affects all members of the community.

Note: To manage this permission for a particular role, go to the Permissions page at the community level and edit the permissions of the individual roles.

Registration and Terms of Service settings

Edit Registration Settings

All anonymous users must register to participate in the community. To register, they must enter mandatory fields such as Username, Password, and so on. By default, the Registration window includes these fields:

Admins and members with appropriate permissions can turn these registration fields on and off from the Settings page as needed. 

To edit registration settings:

1. Sign in to the community as an Admin.
2. Open the Account menu and click Settings.
3. Go to System > Account & Privacy.
4. Go to the Registration section and turn on/off these options:

• Enable member registration: Turns on or off the community self-registration flow. This option is turned off for private and invite-only communities where anonymous users are not allowed to register in the community.
• Add date of birth field to registration page: Controls whether Date of Birth field appears on the Register window.
• Use Date of Birth to enforce the minimum age requirement: Toggle on this option to validate the date of birth provided by the user against the minimum age required for registration.
• Require users to confirm that they meet the minimum age requirement: Toggle on this option to add a field on the Registration window for users to confirm whether they meet the minimum age required for registration.
• Set the Minimum age required for registration. As per the Children’s Online Privacy Protection (COPPA) rule, users must be at least 13 years old to register with the community.
• Terms of service acceptance required: Toggle on this option to add a field on the Registration window for users to read and accept the Terms of Service (TOS).

When all the options are turned on, the Register window looks like this:

Learn more about managing registration settings.

View and Edit Community Terms of Service (TOS)

The Terms of Service (TOS) define the rules and guidelines that members must follow to participate in the community. When people try to register within the community, they must read and agree to the TOS for successful registration.

Your TOS might change from time to time due to updates in the community rules and guidelines. Admins and members with permissions can review and edit the TOS for the selected language from the Settings page as required.

To review and edit Terms of Service:

1. Sign in to the community as an Admin.
2. Open the Account menu and click Settings.
3. Go to System > Account & Privacy.
4. Go to the Registration section.
5. Below the Terms of service acceptance required option, click the View/Edit Terms of Service link.

The Terms of Service page is displayed, where you can review the existing terms and conditions.

6. To edit the TOS, open the Options menu and click Edit.

7. Select the language from the drop-down menu and click Continue.

The editor window opens for the selected language.

8. Update the content and click Save.

The Terms of Service page for the selected language is updated successfully.

Learn more about managing your Terms of Service.

Site Structure children indicator

The Community Structure view now indicates how many children nodes (categories, groups, or boards) are in each container. 

This indicator is a quick way to see how many nodes are within each place.

Learn more about managing your community site structure.

Browser Icon support

Theme Editor now enables you to set the browser icon (also called a Favicon) for the image shown in the top-left corner of your community’s browser tab. 

Browser icons must be a minimum of 512 x 512 px square and be in PNG format. 

To set your the community browser icon:

1. Go to Designer > Theme > Basics.
2. In the Browser Icon section, click Edit.
   
3. Upload your brand’s PNG image.

Learn more about configuring page layouts.

Locked sections for page templates

Some page templates include widgets that provide the core content needed for that template to function as intended. To prevent these sections from being mistakenly edited or deleted, Aurora Designer now automatically locks sections that contain the following content widgets:

• Blog Post content
• Knowledge Base Article content
• Forum Discussion content

This means that for Blog content:

• The section cannot be edited or deleted.
• The main content widget cannot be deleted.
• Widgets cannot be added, edited, or removed from the section.
• The widget type cannot be changed.
• Widgets cannot be moved in or out of the section.

And for Forum and Knowledge Base content:

• The section cannot be deleted.
• The main content widget cannot be deleted.
• Widgets cannot be moved in or out of the section. (However, the widgets can be moved within the section.)

For example, here we see that there are no configuration options for the Blog post section (bottom right in image), but still have partial control (which still displays as locked) over the Knowledge Base article widget (top left in image) and complete control over the Related Content widget.

With some sections and widgets, you may be prevented from adding, editing, removing, and/or moving content to prevent issues with the page template. See Create and arrange sections in a Page Template.

Analytics

To have a successful community, you need to know what’s working and what needs to be improved. Aurora provides a robust set of Community Analytics so you can get actionable insights to drive traffic and member engagement. 

Aurora Analytics gives you a perspective on how your community functions so you can continue to tailor your experience to best fit with your community’s and organization's goals. Aurora Analytics provides visual dashboards and interactive reports to provide you with high-level and detailed data on how your community is performing.  

Accessing Aurora Analytics

To access Aurora Analytics, open your Account menu and click Analytics.

Note: You must be an Administrator or have an Analytics role to access Aurora Analytics.

From the Analytics page, you can access Dashboards and Reports. 

Dashboards provide you with an “at-a-glance” view of the activities that best indicate the overall health of your community and member engagement across your community. Currently, Aurora provides two dashboards:

• Community Health: metrics on traffic, registration, and member retention
  

   

• Community Engagement: metrics on content creation and conception as well as member engagement.
  

Reports present you with key metrics on content, boards, categories, and members in a tabular format. You can drill down to a specific community places to view metrics only for that area.

Learn more about Aurora Analytics.

Community Sitemap File

To help search engines better understand your community site structure and crawl it more effectively, Aurora automatically generates a sitemap for each community when it is created. 

This sitemap lists the URLs of all posts created within the community. It also has URLs of all the community category and board pages. If a sitemap exceeds 50,000 entries, Khoros splits the sitemap file into multiple files. Links to sitemap files are stored within a sitemap index file. The frequency at which the sitemap is generated for the community can also be configured based on how much your community grows and changes over time.

To enable the sitemap for your community and configure its refresh frequency, open a Support ticket.

Developer experience

GraphQL updates - Flood Controls

You can leverage the GraphQL API's flood controls to limit the number of tags someone can apply across the community or to a particular message type (Knowledge Base, Forum, Blog) in a day, hour, or minute.

Known Issues

• When you copy and paste a URL on an android device while using the virtual keyboard's quick paste option and tap the space key, the URL is not auto-linked. This is a known issue with android devices and works fine in iOS.
• When you copy-paste content from the web that contains hyperlinks (for example, Wikipedia pages) using an android device’s quick-paste option from virtual keyboards, the text does not display as hyperlinked text.
• Copy-pasting any content with links from web on a desktop device does not display the "open link in a new tab" icon to the right of the link.
• Currently, the emoji popup windows is displaying behind the create private message modal window, preventing people from adding emojis to private messages.
• The View profile button is still being shown for deleted/banned blog authors in the blogs and knowledge base footers.
• Image captions do not wrap properly when view the published content with the Firefox browser.
• Videos added from a desktop machine are flowing out of main body text area in the mobile responsive view.
• Mentions are not working for people accessing communities through an Android device.

Fixes to core community product

To keep up to date on other fixes made to the core community product, check out the bug fix section of this month's Community Classic Release Notes.