We begin this year with GA releases for Content Workflow and Approval for Blogs and TKB discussion styles along with API, Spam enhancements, Multi-Factor Authentication, Events Analytics, and Billing Metrics. We have also added a new blog just for our developer community! 

• Features
• API updates
• Bug Fixes

Features

• Content Workflow and Approval improvements for Blogs and TKBs (GA)
• Multi-Factor Authentication (GA)
• Enhancements for Spam Management 
• Billing metrics (GA)
• Events Analytics (GA)
• Enhancement to temporarily disable community emails
• Announcement: Temporarily disabling Print Knowledge Base option in Tribal Knowledge Bases. 
• New Developer Blog

Content Workflow and Approval improvements for Blogs and Tribal Knowledge Bases(TKBs) (GA)

In the  20.11 Release Notes, we announced Early Access for Blogs v3 and TKB v4 with a 3-step content-creation workflow to publish articles. This is now available for General Availability (GA). 

These new versions are designed to focus on collaboration and usability for higher quality articles. 

This flowchart shows how an article moves through the publishing workflow and the  tasks members with specific roles can perform. Each article moves through different states and is assigned to members with specific roles. Thus, you always know what state an article is in, and your entire team is clear on their and others’ responsibilities.

Content workflow and approval provides these blog and TKB enhancements:

• Granular Permissions: More robust permission structure to support different content roles - Author, Editor, Publisher for different purposes- create, review and publish respectively. With granular control over author, editor, and publisher permissions, you can clearly define who can perform each task in the publishing workflow.
  Learn more about roles and permissions in Blogs v3 and TKB v4. 
• Dashboard improvements: Improved article dashboard to track an article’s journey in the publishing workflow and make it easier to take relevant actions.
  Learn more about Dashboard improvements for Blog v3 and TKB v4

• Draft History view: A new component to track every action performed on an article until it is published. This records what action was done by whom and at what date and time.

• Compare two versions of a draft or published articles: Compare any two versions when the article is in the workflow process or after the article is published. The highlights show the differences between two versions of a draft or article.

• Internal comments: Provision to add internal notes for the article between the members collaborating on the draft.

• Notifications: Email Notifications to relevant community members at every stage in the Workflow. 
  
  Note:
  • When you upgrade Blogs to Blogs v3, all members with the BlogAuthor role in the previous versions will continue to have the BlogAuthor role in v3. However, in v3, BlogAuthors cannot post blogs directly, they can only send it for review.
  • When you upgrade TKB to TKB v4, members with Start new articles and edit drafts permission will continue to have the permission after upgrade. 
  • You must assign members the BlogEditor, BlogPublisher, TKBAuthor,TKBEditor and TKBPublisher roles. 
  • We recommend that you use the default roles, instead of custom roles, as the workflow notifications are based on the default roles and sent to members who have these roles.

Enablement:
For Blogs v3, goto Studio>Features>Blogs and choose v3.
For TKB v4, goto Studio>Features>TKB and choose v4.
Learn more on quilt changes for Blogsv3 and TKBv4

Learn more about Content Workflow and Approval improvements for Blogs and TKB.

Multi-Factor Authentication (GA)

With this release, we announce the General Availability (GA) of Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA). 

Enabling MFA in your community enforces an additional layer of security which helps prevent unauthorized account access.

After MFA is enabled for a community, the system mandates all privileged users (identified on the basis of certain elevated user permissions) to have this additional level of authentication to access the community. These users must:

• complete a one-time MFA setup for their account and add their account in an authenticator app

• provide a verification code generated by the authenticator app, in addition to the username and password for signing into the community.

Note: As of now, MFA support is available only for non-SSO communities.

To enable MFA for your community, open a Support ticket.

Learn more about MFA.

Enhancements for Spam Management

We’ve introduced enhancements to make it easier to manage spam on your community. With the new Spam Quarantine page, you can seamlessly help combat spam while also reducing the risk of losing legitimate content in your community.

We’ve also made it easier to mark all the posts from users you want to ban from your community as spam when you ban them. This eliminates the hassle of searching for the posts and then marking them as spam while you ban users.

Note : These spam enhancements are available to all customers. 

Spam Quarantine Page

Following are the list of enhancements to the Spam Quarantine page:

• A new look and feel of the Spam Quarantine page. 
  
• You can select multiple posts to mark them as Not Spam.
• You can see whether a post was auto classified as spam by the system, or by a moderator. 
• You can filter out all the auto classified posts for quick review.
• You can select multiple posts to Hide them. The spam posts that you hide will not show up on the Spam Quarantine page. By doing so, you can avoid re-evaluating them for their content. However, the hidden posts will show up on the search results when you search in the Spam Quarantine page.

Learn more about Spam Quarantine.  

Ability to mark all posts of a user as spam while banning the user from your community 

While banning a user from the user’s profile page, check the Mark all content as spam option to mark all the posts of that user as spam and move them to Spam Quarantine. This also deletes all the Private Messages sent by that user.

Note: Ensure that the Match exact username and Match exact email address checkboxes are selected and the user details are of the user whose profile page you are on.

Learn more about banning users from the community.  

Deleting Private Messages sent by a member while marking all their posts as spam

Earlier, the Mark all content as spam option to mark a member’s posts as spam, did not handle the user’s private messages. You had to manually delete all the private messages from that user. In this release, we extend this functionality to delete all the private messages sent by the user. This option is available under the Moderator Controls section in the user’s profile page.

Billing metrics (GA)

We now bring you General Availability for Billing Metrics in Community Analytics. With Billing metrics you can access how your billing-related metrics trend against the contractual tier of your Community.

This metrics shows the current usage against the contractual tier limits for the metrics subscribed to in your contract. Metrics also shows the timeline view of usage of all the metrics subscribed in the contract.

Note: Open a support ticket to enable Billing Analytics in your community.

Learn more about Billing Metrics.

Events Analytics (GA)

We are happy to announce the general availability of Analytics for our brand new discussion style - Events. With Event Analytics you can measure success around the Events in your community and improve engagement and usage. 

It provides you key metrics to measure the value delivered by Community 'Events' as a discussion style, which includes

• Events in your community
• RSVP responses
• Unique visitors to the Event page 
• List of members 

By applying the Event ID (Thread ID)filter, you can list the members who 

• were invited to that event 
• responded with an RSVP to that event
• visited that Event page

Learn more about Events Analytics.

Enhancement to temporarily disable community emails

Up to now, to temporarily pause notification emails to community members, you were required to open a support ticket. 

In this release, we introduce the ability to enable Admins to temporarily disable emails sent from your community to the community members. Admins can use this option to pause notification emails while performing maintenance work on the community, such as consolidating boards and/or updating the community board structure, refining rank structure, or in the event of a spam attack. 

However, members will still receive user registration, password reset, and email update notifications. This option is available in the Admin settings under the Maintenance tab.

Announcements: 

Temporarily disabling the TKB Print Knowledge Base option.  

We are working to improve the performance of the TKB Print Knowledge Base feature. As such, we are temporarily disabling this feature. If you need to use this feature during this time, reach out to our Support team.

New Developer Blog

A new blog dedicated to our development and engineering community is now available in the Dev Network area of Atlas. Our goal with this new blog is to share information, tip and tricks, success stories, and other topics of interest to developers and engineers working with Khoros' many products and solutions.

In a general audience blog format, we rarely get the opportunity to explore how our APIs and software features can help engineers build successful solutions around Khoros products. This is where the new Developer Blog comes in. It's a chance for us to "get into the weeds" about how you can get the most out of Khoros' APIs for your next project.

Do you have a successful project or innovative solution that you would like to share with the Khoros dev community? Email us and let us know. We'd love to have you as a guest author.

API updates

21.1 introduces several new capabilities to the endpoints responsible for creating and updating messages in Community API v2. These new capabilities are centered around the new content workflow system:

• Apply a draft status to new TKB articles and blog posts.
• Perform edit actions on drafts ahead of submitting them for publication.
• Submit TKB articles and blog posts for publication.
• Return articles from a review state back to a draft state for additional author action.
• Return an edited article or post to the editor for additional action.
• Recall an article to a draft state (performed by an author).
• Publish an article.
• Schedule, update, or cancel a publication time for a new post or article.
• Nominate a forum topic to become a TKB article.
• Approve/reject a nomination (forum topics nominated to become TKB articles).
• Add and remove contributors to a blog post or TKB article.

We have also added several new LiQL capabilities for the new content workflow system. These include:

• Retrieve content workflow information for a specified message.
• Retrieve messages with a draft, in_review, in_approval, or nominated state within a board.
• Retrieve the current publication status for a message.
• Retrieve messages for a specified board where a targeted user is listed as contributor or coauthor.

You Found It. We Fixed It.

• We have fixed the issue where images for badges loaded in SVG format were not displayed in the user’s View All page for badges. 
• We have fixed the issue where legitimate posts were marked as spam when they were edited and published multiple times. 
• We have fixed the issue where case creation in our case portal was taking longer than expected