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Release Notes
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Community Aurora 23.6 Release Notes

LauraV's avatar
LauraV
Khoros Staff
2 years ago

Aurora Video Tour

We've put together this video training course to help you get familiar with key features and concepts about Khoros' re-imagined Community Experience. This 12-video series is grouped into three community personas:

  • Managers
  • Moderators
  • Members

The entire course takes about 1 hour to complete.

Note: We will be updating these videos and adding new ones as we continue to roll out new Aurora features. Subscribe to this article to be notified when new videos are available.

Member Experience

Content Workflow for Knowledge Base articles and Blog posts

We are excited to announce the release of a content workflow system to publish Blog posts and Knowledge Base (KB) articles. This 3-step content-creation workflow provides for authoring, editing, and publishing to focus on collaboration and usability.

You now have more granular control over author, editor, and publisher permissions, enabling you to clearly define who can perform each task in the publishing workflow. Each blog post or KB article moves through different states, and members can view the latest state of articles and blog posts via Manage Content Dashboard.

This flowchart shows how an article moves through the publishing workflow and the tasks members with specific roles can perform.

Feature Enablement

Admins can enable content workflow in your community. To enable it, go to Account menu > Settings > Features > General and enable Content Workflow.

Learn more on how to enable Content Workflow in the community.

Key Features

    • Granular Permissions: After you enable the feature, you can see different roles to support the Author, Editor, and Publisher content roles for the purposes of creating, reviewing, and publishing, respectively. The roles include BlogAuthor, BlogEditor, and BlogPublisher as well as KBAuthor, KBEditor, and KBPublisher.
    • 3-step workflow: After you assign the above roles to members, every draft will go through the process of publishing articles with a 3-step workflow that provides for authoring, editing, and publishing. Below is an example of a blog post’s draft page that was written by a member with a BlogAuthor role and submitted for review. You can see the status of the draft, version number, and perform further actions depending on your role in the workflow process.

      Different states of a draft in the workflow process:

        • Draft: Article or blog post has been created or edited but isn't ready to be reviewed or published.
        • Awaiting Review: Article or blog post draft is ready for review.
        • Awaiting Publication: Article or blog post has been reviewed and is ready for approval and publication.
        • Published: Article or blog post has been published. If this article or blog post was a revision for an already published article or blog post, this new version replaces the previous version in the community.
    • Version History: Click Version History on the draft page to track every action performed on a draft or an article or blog post until it is published. This records what action was done by whom and at what date and time.
    • Manage Content Dashboard: From the Manage Content page, you can track a draft of an article or blog post’s journey in the publishing workflow. You can also take relevant actions from here.

Note: Email notifications are not sent to members when the draft’s state changes. This feature will be available in a future release.

Learn more about Content Workflow for blog posts and KB articles.

Email Notifications for Ranks

You will now receive an email notification when you achieve a new rank. 

 

Learn more about email notifications and how to manage them.

Reporting Private messages

Members can now report private messages that they find inappropriate. In a private message, they can either report an entire conversation or a specific reply they find inappropriate.

To report a private message:

  1. Sign in to the community and click the envelope icon to go to the Inbox.
  2. In the left panel, click the message you want to report.
  3. To report an entire conversation, click Options icon > Report Conversation next to the root message.

    To report a reply, click Options icon > Report Message next to the reply.
     
  4. (Optional) In the Report Conversation or Report Message window, enter the Details about why the message is inappropriate.
  5. Click Report.

After you report the message, the message is sent to the Abuse tab under Content Management dashboard, where a Moderator reviews and confirms or ignores the reported message.

Learn more about reporting inappropriate private messages.

Auto-suggest Similar Posts

With this release, when you try to create new content (Forum discussions, Blog posts, or Knowledge Base articles) and the title of the content matches any posts that already exist in the community, an “i” icon is displayed that you can click to view a list of similar posts. With this, you can avoid creating duplicate content in the community

Administrator Experience

Inbox permissions

The Inbox permission previously named Send and receive private messages has been updated to Send private messages. If the Private Messages feature is enabled for an Aurora community, members will always be able to receive private messages. Therefore, the permission no longer includes "receive."

Additional Inbox privacy settings for members will be available in a future release. 

Learn how to configure private message settings and permissions for the community.

Member Permissions Lookup

With the new Member Permissions page, you can look up the permissions and roles of an individual member of the community to see what they have access to do. You can also assign them to more roles (or remove them) from this page.

Note: You cannot change the individual permissions of a member. Instead, you must add them to roles that have the permissions you want that member to have. If you want a member to have unique permissions, create a role just for that member and adjust the permissions as desired.

To look up a member’s roles and permissions at the community level:

Note: If you want to look up a member’s permissions at a category, board, or group level, you must select that place in the place picker first on the Roles and Permissions page.

  1. Go to Settings > Users > Roles and Permissions.
  2. In the left column, click Member Permissions Lookup.
  3. In the field, enter the username of the member whose permissions you want to view.
  4. On the Member Permissions page scoped to the community level, view Member Information, Community Roles, Group Roles, and Community Permissions. Roles are shown with the level at which they were assigned, and permissions show the grant or deny status in addition to the role that granted or denied that permission for the member.

    Note: When you have chosen a lower-level place, instead of Community Roles, you’ll see Category Roles (this section also contains roles for lower-level places within the category), Knowledge Base Roles, Blog Roles, or Forum Roles. Also at lower levels, you’ll see Category Permissions, Group Permissions, Knowledge Base Permissions, Blog Permissions, or Forum Permissions. At the board level (Knowledge Base, Blog, or Forum), the Group Roles section is not available.
  5. (Optional) In the Community Roles area, you can also assign more roles to the member or remove existing roles from the member.

Note: When you have chosen a lower-level place, any roles you assign or remove are applied only at that level. 

For more information, see Look up a member’s roles and permissions.

Edit Community Info

Admins can now change the name of the community within the site structure. Go to Settings > Community Structure, and then click the gear icon. On the Edit Community Info window, enter the updated name in the Community name field. 

See Change your community’s name.

Ranks updates

To improve the rank experience, we’ve made some changes to what is supported during the rank creation process. At this time, to establish the best quality images, only PNG rank icons are supported.

Additionally, to ensure that no community members are granted access to more permissions than they should have, and alternatively that no community members are revoked access to permissions they should have, the option to add or remove the Administrator or Moderator role via Ranks is not available.

To learn more about Ranks, see About member Ranks and ranking formulas.

Rank Filter in Analytics Dashboard

In the Aurora 23.5 release, we introduced a filter option in the Analytics Dashboard to filter by Roles, New topics, and User Name. With this release, we’ve added the Ranks filter. 

Learn more about filtering your dashboard.

Community-level configurations in Analytics dashboards

You can now configure the Trending Discussion Definitions configurations as well as the staff roles for your community.

  • Persistent values in the Trending Discussion Definitions configuration: The values you set for the Trending Discussion Definitions configurations in the Analytics Dashboard settings will persist until you manually change the values and save again.

  • Defining staff roles: With this release, we've introduced an Exclude Employee feature, which allows you to filter out the metrics corresponding to staff members, identified by specific role(s). You can search for and select the roles in the Employee Roles field in the Dashboard’s settings.

As an example, let's consider the roles "Admins_Org_StaffOnly" and "AnalyticsUser_Org_StaffOnly," which are designed exclusively for administrators and analytics members who are employees or staff of your organization. 

Enter these roles in the Employee Roles field in the Dashboard’s settings and click Save.

Now, navigate to the Dashboard and scroll down to the Observing vs. Participating vs. Contributing Members trend chart. When you don't enable the Exclude Employees option and hover your cursor over the trend lines, you see the count of engagement from all community members for a specific date.

If you select the Exclude Employees option, the trend lines provide the actual count of engagement solely from your community members, excluding any contributions from employees or staff within your organization who have the "Admins_Org_StaffOnly" or "AnalyticsUser_Org_StaffOnly” roles.

 

Learn more about the Exclude Employees filter.

Note: The Exclude Employees filter is available only in the Observing vs. Participating vs. Contributing Members widget. This option will be available in other widgets in future releases.

Visits by User Type widget (Member vs. Anonymous visits)

The Visits by User Type widget gives you the number of signed-in and anonymous users visiting your community. A trend widget also shows the trend of these visits in your community.

You can see which area in the community contributed to a spike in its visits. 

To have a better understanding of these numbers, click the date to which you want to compare the change. A window opens that displays the counts for Visits, Previous Visits, and the % change for these visits in a tabular format for that date.

By default, the table shows the count for signed-in members. The first row displays visits metrics for the landing page of the scoped place that you set in the Dashboard Settings.

 

To view the visit metrics by boards , select the Visits by boards checkbox.

To view the visit counts for each of the topics in these boards, select the Visits by topics checkbox.

Similarly, you can view the visits metrics by boards or topics for Anonymous users.

Learn more about Visits by User Type

Registration and Sign-in settings

In the Registration settings, admins can now ensure that new members of the community are automatically assigned a role. From the account menu, go to Settings > System > Account & Privacy. In the Registration section, turn on Auto-assign role upon registration and click Edit. On the window, enter the role you want to assign to new members.

Admins can also now turn on the option for community members to stay signed in to the community. From the account menu, go to Settings > System > Account & Privacy. In the Sign in section, turn on Keep me signed in. With this setting turned on, members of the community can select the Keep me signed in checkbox on the Sign In window.

Learn how to configure registration and sign-in settings for the community.

Content filters

Sometimes, members post objectionable content that might offend other members and negatively impact the community’s overall health. Objectionable content can include inappropriate language or any other terms you might not want to be displayed. 

Aurora now offers content filters as part of its moderation tools to prevent objectionable content from appearing in posts, replies, tags, private messages, profile information, and member registration. 

When members use inappropriate words across the community, the content filters identify them and prevent the content from being published or replacing the words with pre-defined replacement terms.

Aurora includes several default filters that can be triggered when someone registers, posts, adds a tag, sends private messages, or updates their profile information. 

You can add terms to these default filters or edit default filters as needed. You can also create new filters to perform various actions when the filter terms are identified in the community:

  • Do not allow: Prevents members from posting content or replies, registering to the community, adding tags, updating profile information, and sending private messages until the filter term is removed. This more heavy-handed approach runs the risk of either challenging members to find a way to defeat it or alienating them. When a filter term is identified, the following error message is displayed:
     
  • Replace term: Replaces the offensive term with another term. This is the most common way of handling smut filter infractions. You can configure what term to replace words that match this filter in the Replacement term field. When the filter term is identified, it is replaced with the configured term after you post the content.
  • Check inline HTML and do not allow: Prevents the members from posting anything that contains a filtered term after ignoring inline HTML. For example, the term “crap” written in inline HTML format, “c<b>r</b>a<br>p” in any new post is identified as the filter term after ignoring the inline HTML.
  • Take no action: Does not take any action on the filtered terms that appear across the community but records them in the Content Filters dashboard for moderators to review the usage of these terms in the content.

Admins, Moderators, and members with appropriate permissions can access the Content Filters in the Moderation settings area (from the Settings > Features > Moderation). The Content Filters tab includes the default filters as shown below:

To add a new content filter, click Add Filter.

Learn more about content filters and setting up the content filters.

Managing reported private messages

To manage inappropriate private messages reported by members, moderators (and other members with the appropriate permissions) can go to the Abuse tab on the Manage Content dashboard, accessible from your Account menu:

On the Abuse tab, go to Filters and select Member for Reported by and Private Messages for Found In:

Learn more about managing reported private messages. 

Manage URL redirects for Community pages

Over time, content on your community changes, moves, is deleted/archived, or is replaced. When this happens, you want to make sure that the web searches don’t show results that go to obsolete or missing pages. Or, sometimes, you might want to point people to newer or more relevant content.

To help optimize these search results and make sure that people get to the right content, you can create redirect rules.

Redirects enable you to keep the page and link authority of your website when a website’s URL is redirected to another URL for any reason. 

The most common types of redirects are 301 (permanent) redirects and 302 (temporary) redirects. Permanent redirects are for the pages that you do not want to retain and might want to permanently delete. Temporary redirects are for the pages you plan to keep in place for a finite time period. 

Admins and members with the Manage Redirect Rules permission can access the Redirect Rules section on the SEO Settings page (Settings > System > SEO).

To add a redirect rule:

  1. Sign in to the community as an Admin.
  2. Go to Settings > System > SEO.
  3. Click Add Rule.

    The Add Rule window opens.

     
  4. Enter the Source and Destination URLs. (URLs must be from one of your company’s community pages.)
  5. Select Redirect Type: 301 (Permanent) or 302 (Temporary).
  6. Click Save.

Note: It takes an hour for the redirect rules to be reflected on the site.

Learn more about Redirects Rules.

Review tags added in the Community

From time to time, you may want to review the tags used across the community to understand how the content is being categorized and organized. It can also help you understand members' engagement and contribution to the community.

Admins and members with the Manage Tags permission can access the Tags tab on the Manage Content dashboard, where they can review the complete list of tags.

To review tags added in the community:

  1. Sign in to your community as a Moderator.
  2. Open the Account menu and go to Manage > Content.
    The Manage Content page is displayed.
  3. Go to the Tags tab.

By default, The Tags tab is displayed with the list of tags that are associated with posts across the community.

When you scope the tab to a different node, the Tags tab lists the tags that are associated with the posts of the respective node.

Learn more about reviewing tags added in the community.

Developer Experience

Dev Tools admin page

The Dev Tools admin page is where you develop and test custom solutions for your Aurora community. This area includes a Git flow command guide, an SDK token generator, and a branch-switching tool for validating any updates.

Think of it as your one-stop shop for your development teams.

To access the Dev Tools page, open the Account menu and click Dev Tools.

Refer to our Dev Tools documentation for more information about:

Quilt Overrides

You can customize Quilts in Aurora using overrides that can be applied to your community through either GraphQL mutations or directly through your community's GitHub repository. Our Developer Docs Portal now includes guides to help you:

Theme Overrides

Theme overrides enable you to take the default Aurora theme and customize it to meet your brand's needs. While you can override the default Theme using Aurora Designer, we've made it possible for you to create and manage your custom themes through GraphQL mutations as well as via your community's Git Repository.

In the new Working with Themes chapter of the Developer Docs Portal, you can learn:

API Tutorials

We have added five tutorials to enhance the developer experience.

 

Updated 2 years ago
Version 4.0
communities aurora
release notes
LauraV's avatar
Khoros Staff
Joined January 25, 2021
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