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Khoros Communities 20.8 Release Notes

JohnD's avatar
JohnD
Khoros Alumni (Retired)
5 years ago

Community 20.8 delivers self-service for many Community page URL redirects, a sneak peek at improvements to Community in-app user guidance and help, as well as enhancements to several existing features and APIs.

New Features and enhancement

Coming Soon: Improved User Guidance and Help for Community

In the coming months, we will be rolling out a new User Guidance/Help solution for Community and Community Analytics. 

First up will be in-app guides. These guides will provide you with a helpful information, including:

  • New feature announcements
  • Product alerts and notifications
  • Tips to help you get the most out of community features

Don’t be surprised if you start seeing guides like this in the coming weeks:

And don’t worry, we won’t be spamming you with lots of pop-ups. These guides are intended to help you get the most out of the product and get out of your way fast.

Next, we’ll be rolling out our new Resource Center, which you can open by clicking the question mark icon at the top-right corner of the application window. 

Use the Resource Center to get product help, access Release Notes, and learn about available Product Coaching sessions and community best practices.

Note: Later this year, we plan to remove the existing Help drawer that appears at the bottom of the Admin and Studio apps. This feature-level help content will all be available within the Help section of the new Resource Center.

Guides and Resource Center will be available in:

  • Community Admin
  • Studio
  • App Creator
  • Toolbox
  • Moderation
  • Community Analytics

URL redirect rules for Community pages

Over time, content on your community changes, moves, is deleted/archived, or replaced. When this happens, you want to make sure that Internet searches don’t show results that go to obsolete/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 redirects rules.

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

Basically, redirects help you keep the SEO of your website healthy and keep visitors engaged on your site. Properly defined redirects help keep your search rankings. The most common types of redirects are 301 (permanent) redirect and 302 (temporary) redirect.

Previously, you needed to open a Support ticket to get these search redirect rules created. As of the 20.8 Release, you can create these search redirect rules yourself from Community Admin.

Note: To create redirect rules other than 301 or 302 redirects, you must still open a Support ticket.

The ability to create, edit, or delete redirect rules is granted through the Manager redirects permission, located under Admin > Users > Defaults > SEO Redirects. This permission is denied by default. We recommend enabling this permission for Admins or other trusted community members. 

Members with this permission have access to the Redirect Rules tab under Admin > System > SEO.

Learn more about setting up members to create redirect rules and how to manage these rules from Community Admin .

Addition of new columns to Bulk Download of member data in Community Analytics

Bulk Download Members Data provides a snapshot of member activity and community influence. 

With the 20.8 release, this report will include Registration Start Date, Registration Completion Date, and Registration Status columns.

Registration Start Date is the timestamp (UTC) when the member initiates the registration process. The Registration Completion Date is the timestamp (UTC) when the Registration Status changes from “Partially Registered” to “Registered".  

If the registration was completed more than two years ago, the Registration Date will be empty in the Bulk Download Members Data report. 

With the addition of these columns, you can now filter the list of members who completed their registration within the time frame selected for the report.

Learn more on download community member metrics.

Cookie Banner enhancements

Currently, when users visit the community the cookie banner appears and prompts them for consent to use site cookies. The Click Here link opens the webpage that describes your cookie policy, but it does not dismiss the banner.

As of today, clicking OK or continuing to use the site is considered as user consent to add or set all community cookies.

With the 20.8 release, we have changed this behavior. 

Users must now click OK in the cookie banner and explicitly confirm their consent to activate the community cookies. Continuing to use the site will not be considered as a user consent anymore. 

If users do not provide their explicit consent, only the Type 1 cookies(“Strictly Necessary”) are set, and all other cookies are held back. 

With this release, we also re-classified the LithiumVisitor and VISITOR_BEACON cookies into Type 1.

Learn more about cookies found in Khoros communities.

API Updates

api.mark_read view count update

The Community API v2 api.mark_read query parameter now increments the view count for messages for anonymous as well as signed-in users. See Mark a message as 'read' for more information about the api.mark_read query parameter.

Constrain message queries by messages posted or edited in the past n days

We have added new fields, constraints, and sorts to enable you to constrain queries to the messages, reviews, and review_comments collections by posts that have been posted or edited in the past n days. In this context, the term posts refers to topics, replies, and comments for all conversation styles (forum, idea, TKB, QandA, group, blog, contest) including reviews and review comments.

See Get messages posted or edited in a specified range of time for more information and examples. 

Developer Documentation improvements

We've given our Community API v2 endpoint and LiQL documentation a refresh in order to improve usability and the search experience. See our announcement in the Community Blog.
 
Here's a quick look.
 
You'll now find the endpoint documentation in the API Reference section, organized by HTTP method type.
 
 

 

You'll find LiQL reference information in the Guides section with our LiQL guides and examples.
 

 

 
API v2 and LiQL reference now appear in Search results.
 
 
 

Our legacy API v2 experience will remain in place for two weeks to ease the transition. We hope that you find these changes helpful.

You Found It. We Fixed it

  • We have fixed the issue where images that were uploaded when sending a private message from a mobile device were placed in the sender’s public image album instead of their hidden album.  
  • We have fixed the issue where users were not appearing in the @mentions pop-up menu, despite typing in their entire user name.
  • Previously, when you sorted the list of Group Hubs by different criteria, the number of group hubs was returned each time. This display issue has been fixed.
  • Previously, the Net Accepted Solutions metric key worked only in Studio and not the SDK. This issue has been fixed, and the key is now available via the SDK.
  • We have fixed the issue where the Real-time Virus Scanner took a very long time to complete attachment scans or in some cases, never completed the scan.
Updated 7 months ago
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JohnD's avatar
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26 Comments

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  • Fellsteruk's avatar
    Fellsteruk
    Boss
    5 years ago

    Wait what... URL redirect rules for Community pages, I had to read this twice and thrice. My team will be very pleased but likely not as pleased as Khoros support who get a couple requests a week to add redirects so i'm very pleased to see this added, couple questions:

    1. Will all existing redirects added by support be listed within Admin allowing us to edit them rather than adding another redirect?
    2. Is there a search feature, i have thousands of redirects already active in the system, search would be super helpful, if not can we dump a list of all redirects from admin, i know support can provide this historically 
    3. Can the FROM and TO points be any page in community? One of the limitations of promoted search is that it's locked to "content" but i have lots of custom pages which im unable to feature in search ;( will this allow me to redirect any path or any other path, providing im not creating an infinite loop 😛 
    4. Does it have any rules in place to protect against numptys, obviously i'll only be grating access to approved users but we all make mistakes, will it prevent creating loops or adding multiple redirects from the same place. 

    Thanks for adding this feature as i say will likely save support a lot of work but also makes life a little easier not having to use cases for a simple redirect.

  • TeroRe's avatar
    TeroRe
    Executive
    5 years ago

    Sorry but I don't understand this URL Redirect rules. What are the situations when to use it?

    For example: If we have link to the thread or blog article and we change the title afterwards, platform will automatically redirect the user to the right place.

  • Fellsteruk's avatar
    Fellsteruk
    Boss
    5 years ago

    Hey Terore, 

    Correct the platform does auto manage alias pretty well but lets say you have two TKB's and you decide to merge them or replace them with something that isnt a TKB? Alias wont fix this, it may work for one but the other would need a redirect. 

    Another example, lets say you want to print a url on your welcome pack or box of some equipment which is essentially a TKB or other page in your community:

    www.yourdomain.com/t5/Khoros-Communities-Release-Notes/Khoros-Communities-20-8-Release-Notes/bc-p/606781#M1726

    That dont look too great however the following does:

    www.yourdomain.com/setupguide

    Over the years ive also decommissioned several websites, moved their content and pushed them to our help site "khoros" adding redirect along the way to support, granted a lot of them wont be used any more as google should pick up on the 301 and update it's index. We use the platform pretty extensively for content outside of the basic interaction styles and this is very welcome. 


  • TeroRe's avatar
    TeroRe
    Executive
    5 years ago

    Fellsteruk I didnt mean to blame you, or questionnaire. As i said I dont understand. But now I do.

    About your another example, I think we can create those short urls by ourselves, outside of the community (in our .com CMS). Least we have done so far. It might be faster to do it to community platform, because I can do it myself though.

  • miles's avatar
    miles
    Director
    5 years ago

    This is a good update, well done Khoros team 🙂 

    I have the same questions as Fellsteruk as well as a slight extension - can we setup redirects that point outside of community, or only to another piece of community content or page within the community?

    There are some things we'd want to redirect people to other parts of our website (outside community).

  • Fellsteruk's avatar
    Fellsteruk
    Boss
    5 years ago

    miles  Very good shout out!!!! You can do this today with a redirect via support so i'd like to think so but i think the answer is NO. 

    Just had a look at the screenshot above and it says that the host name must be removed from the source and destination so it appears you're only allowed to enter the page path after the domain which means you're unable to push any traffic off the platform via this feature. 

    That is a shame as i do this often for some of our other websites, but it can be achieved with a support ticket 

  • NoorS's avatar
    NoorS
    Khoros Alumni (Retired)
    5 years ago

    Hi Fellsteruk 

    Hope you will like the feature. 😊

    Herein, are the answers to your questions:

    1. Will all existing redirects added by support be listed within Admin allowing us to edit them rather than adding another redirect?

    No, all the existing redirects will not be listed in the Admin. With this feature, you can create new redirect rules. However, please note that if you wish to change an existing redirect rule (that was previously created), you will have to delete that first and create a new one in the Admin. This is a limitation right now.

    1. Is there a search feature, i have thousands of redirects already active in the system, search would be super helpful, if not can we dump a list of all redirects from admin, i know support can provide this historically 

    Presently, we do not have a search feature for the rules. We wanted to understand the number of rules created by Admins and provide “search” functionality accordingly. But we have it in our backlog.

    1. Can the FROM and TO points be any page in community? One of the limitations of promoted search is that it's locked to "content" but i have lots of custom pages which im unable to feature in search ;( will this allow me to redirect any path or any other path, providing im not creating an infinite loop 😛 

    Yes, FROM and TO can be from any community page. But we do have checks where we do not allow nested loops to get created. 

    1. Does it have any rules in place to protect against numptys, obviously i'll only be grating access to approved users but we all make mistakes, will it prevent creating loops or adding multiple redirects from the same place. 

    There are not any specific rules that can protect against numptys, as such. 🙂 However, we have delete functionality. If ever you feel that rule is created by mistake, it can be deleted in a jiffy and redirection will be reversed instantly. Further, we do have checks in place to avoid nested loops. 

    Please let me know if you have any questions.

    Thanks