The 23.4 Release includes several new features, including our first release of Ranks, more control over video upload settings, Content Editor keyboard shortcuts, markdown support, and other editing controls, the ability to quickly manage member roles, and lots more.

Member Experience

Use keyboard shortcuts and Markdown to work faster  

While creating or editing community content, you can make use of keyboard shortcuts and keyboard navigation to work faster and more efficiently.

The Content Editor also now supports Markdown. Markdown is a plain text formatting syntax commonly used by writers and programmers to write quickly without having to take time using the formatting toolbar of text editors.

For example, to apply bolding to a word, you can type **bold word** instead of having to highlight the text and click the bold icon in the editing toolbar.

While creating or editing any content, you can refer to the Editor Help for assistance using these tools.

View the Editor Help by clicking the Options icon > Help in the toolbar.

Note: The Editor Help recognizes if you are using a Mac or Windows machine and displays the appropriate keyboard shortcuts and commands. 

The Editor Help provides information about these editing features:

• Shortcuts: Use keyboard shortcuts to quickly apply standard text and paragraph formatting (for example, bold, italics, paragraph headers) to your content.
• Keyboard Navigation: Describes how you can navigate community pages using the keyboard instead of a mouse.
• Markdown syntax: Lists the markdown syntaxes you can use while writing content instead of formatting the text using toolbar options.
  
  
  

Learn more about keyboard shortcuts and the editor help options.

Administrator Experience

Ranks

A rank is essentially the set of criteria a member must meet and the rewards the member receives as a result. The criteria for a rank typically measure a member's activity in the community over time. For higher ranks, you might include criteria that measure the quality of community contributions in the form of number of solutions accepted or average ratings. The rewards for a rank tend to be increased recognition in the form of special icons or styling for the member’s username and access to privileges that are otherwise restricted.

Most communities use a series of ranks to recognize and reward community members. When they first join a community, members typically receive a “newbie” or “default” rank. As members spend time creating and engaging with content in the community, they can advance in rank.

A member’s rank is visible on the member’s profile page as well as in the Account menu.

The criteria required for achieving ranks, however, are not visible to non-admins. This is to prevent people from “gaming the system” to quickly advance in rank.

Common events that affect a member's rank are:

• Number of tags applied to content
• Minutes online
• Number of sign-ins
• Number of page views
• Number of posts created
• Accepted Solutions granted
• Likes given and received

You can create your own ranking formulas based on these and lots of other criteria.

To create a rank:

1. Go to Admin > Settings > Users > Ranks and Badges.
2. In the Ranks area, ensure that the Ranks feature is turned on.
3. In the Rank Levels area, click Add Rank.
   
   
4. On the Add Rank window, complete the following steps:

1. Add a Name for the rank.
2. (Optional) Enter a Description.
3. Enter the desired Criteria for the rank (see Create a ranking formula).
   
   
4. (Optional) Enter any Roles granted to members who achieve this rank.
5. (Optional) Enter any Roles removed from members who achieve this rank.
6. In the Visual Style area, select a Label display type:
   • Text Only
   • Outline
   • Filled
7. Select a color from the Label color drop-down menu.
   
8. (Optional) In the Icon area, upload an icon from your machine to include beside the rank label. 
   Note: Uploaded images are converted to 16 pixels in height and up to 100 pixels in width wherever they appear in the community (square images will be 16 px by 16 px). Your image will be scaled to fit the supported dimensions, so we don’t recommend using a really tall image as it will be difficult to see when it’s scaled to 16 pixels high. As described in the next step, you can see a preview of your rank image before saving. Supported file types are .jpeg/.jpg, .png, and .gif. 
   
9. View the Preview of your design to verify that it looks the way you want it to.
10. Click Add Rank.
    
    

Back on the Ranks page, in the Rank Levels area, drag and drop the newly created rank to the desired position in the ranking structure.

Tip: Ranks should be organized in order of how difficult they are to achieve. The most difficult ranks to achieve should be displayed at the top of the ranking structure on the Ranks page and have lower numbers (shown to the left of the rank) associated with them. The higher the rank level number is, the easier that rank is to achieve and the lower it is displayed in the ranking structure. For instance, 0 is the lowest rank level number in your ranking structure, but it is the hardest rank to achieve. When creating your ranks, keep this hierarchy in mind—that is, don’t put ranks in a random order or organize them alphabetically. If you don’t organize them by difficulty of achievement, they will not be awarded appropriately across the community.

The rank is now available for use in the community. Members are evaluated against the ranking system each time they sign in to the community or shortly after they have met the criteria. At that point, they are awarded the rank.

Tip: When you first launch your community, you have a set of default ranks already created. However, you may want to add more lower-level ranks to enable members to progress more quickly and get instant reinforcement. As your community matures, you may want to add higher-level ranks that are more difficult to achieve.

Learn more about ranks:

• About member ranks and ranking formulas
• About default community ranks
• Create a rank
• Create a ranking formula
• Enable ranks in your community

Manage video upload settings

You can now manage where members can upload videos to your community. You can enable video upload site wide or turn it on or off for specific places.

Note: The Video Uploads feature must be enabled and members must have a role that grants them the Add videos permission to upload videos. 

To enable and configure video-related settings for your community:

1. Go to Settings > Content Features.
2. Click Media.
   
   
3. Turn on Video uploads to enable members to add images to their content
4. Click Edit to set the maximum file size (in MB) for uploaded videos.
5. Turn on or off the ability to embed externally hosted video content.
6. Click Save.

To override these the setting to upload videos at lower-level categories or boards:

1. Choose the location where you want to override media settings.
   
   
2. Scroll to the Media section under Content Features.
   
   
    
3. Turn on or off Embed external videos and Video uploads as needed.

Avatar permission updates

In this release, we added a new avatar-related permission and updated the name of another permission.

As an admin, you can manage the permissions for Avatars. Both the permission for a member to upload their own avatar and the permission for a member to select an avatar from a collection are enabled by default.

To manage member avatar permissions:

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

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 Profile.
4. In the Member Profile section, to manage whether a member can upload their own avatar, beside Upload own avatar, click Deny or Grant as required.
5. To manage whether a community member can select an avatar from your community collection, beside Choose avatar from collections, click Deny or Grant as required.
   
   

Unless you have specified different permissions for certain roles, these selections affect all members of the community.

Manage member roles from the profile page 

The roles that members have determine what they can access and do in the community. These roles are usually a mix of the community default roles and custom roles your community team have created. From time to time, you might want to remove a role or assign additional roles to members to control their access to various community areas and features. Community managers, moderators, and members with appropriate permissions can manage the roles assigned to individual members from that member’s member profile page. 

Note: Moderators cannot assign or remove any roles that grant higher permissions than their individual roles.

To manage a member’s role:

1. Go to the member’s profile page.
2. Open the gear menu and click Manage Roles.
    
3. To remove a role from the member, click the X next to the role you want to remove.

   

    
4. To assign a role to the member, click Add role, search for the role you want to add, and select it.
   
    

   

5. Click Save.
   
    

   

Regulate content crawling by search engines using robots.txt  

When you publish content in a community, search engines (web robots or web crawlers) crawl these newly published pages to discover and gather information from them. After crawling the content, the search engines index these pages to provide relevant search results based on the search queries.

It is important to instruct the web crawlers to crawl only the relevant pages and ignore the pages that don't require crawling activity.

Using Robots Exclusion Protocol (a file called robots.txt), you can indicate the resources that need to be included or excluded from the crawling activity. 

When a new community is created, the Khoros platform configures the robots.txt file with the default rules for the community. The default rules include instructions, which are generic for all communities.

Admins and members with permissions can view the Default Rules in Robots.txt Editor (from Settings > System > SEO area).

In the editor, you can also add custom rules that are appended after the default rules. 

Note: You cannot edit the default rules.

Learn more about robot.text and how to create custom rules.

Designer improvements

Color Picker Hex Code

When you hover your cursor over a color choice in the color picker, the hex code is displayed. This enables you to distinguish between similar colors before making your selection.

Featured Content and Places widget updates

If you reset the layout of a page with a populated Featured widget or delete a section containing a populated Featured widget, that Featured widget is deleted from all other page templates on which it appears. If you attempt to reset or delete, you will receive a warning that also indicates all other places where the widget is located.

Learn more about the Featured Content and Featured Places widgets.

Update to which members can edit list widgets

Starting with this release, community members with the Group Owner or Group Curator role are granted the Edit items in list widgets permission by default. 

This permission enables members to edit and manage the content that displays in lists widgets like Featured Content and Featured Places.

Learn more about Featured Content and Places widgets. 

Developer Experience

The Developer Docs Portal for Aurora is now available. The portal features a GraphQL explorer which you can use to explore the GraphQL API and build queries which you can test against our demo instance of Aurora.

We are in the process of writing documentation for the Aurora SDK, with dozens of new guides and tutorials coming over the next few months.

In 23.4, we've added several new features to the GraphQL API.

Ranks Icons

You can now create new ranks with associated icons directly through the API.

Roles

We have added support for role creation and management through the GraphQL API. These additions cover standard administrative actions including:

• Create a Role
• Add Users to a Role

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.