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 in Community
- URL redirect rules for Community pages
- Addition of new columns to Bulk Download of member data in Community Analytics
- Cookie Banner enhancements
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
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.
