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Release Notes & Updates
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Khoros Communities 26.2 Release Notes [Updated]

MiladC's avatar
MiladC
Khoros Staff
2 months ago

The 26.2 release introduces Aurora AI capabilities for content moderation, automated responses, and workflow orchestration. It also addresses critical security vulnerabilities, delivers search and rich text editor improvements, and resolves stability issues across analytics and content archival.

New Features (Aurora — Early Access)

Availability: All three features below are in early access behind feature flags — nothing activates automatically. Fully configurable from the admin panel. Contact your Customer Success Manager to enable. Classic customers should reach out to their CSM to discuss migration.

AI Moderation + Appeals

Automates content moderation decisions based on your community guidelines, configured in plain language.

  • Auto-approve and auto-block: Clear-cut content is handled instantly, reducing manual review volume.
  • Gray-area escalation: Ambiguous content is held for human review rather than auto-actioned.
  • Member appeals: Members can submit structured appeals against moderation decisions, preserving trust without adding moderator workload.

Community Language Model (CLM) / Answer Assist

Provides AI-generated responses to unanswered community posts after a configurable time threshold has been reached.

  • Community-first response window: You define how long to wait before Answer Assist activates, giving members the first opportunity to respond.
  • Source attribution: Every AI-generated answer cites the specific authors and posts it drew from, keeping community experts visible.

Community Orchestrator

A rules-based automation engine that triggers actions on community events such as new registrations, first posts, and milestone achievements.

  • Automated workflows: Configure welcome sequences, expert notifications, milestone recognition, and onboarding prompts.
  • Event-driven execution: Actions fire automatically when defined conditions are met — set up once, runs continuously.

Bugs & Security Fixes

Classic

  • Fixed search autocomplete not returning results when queries contain special characters like trademark symbols or apostrophes.
  • Fixed cursor jumping to the top of the article when applying formatting in Firefox.
  • Fixed message position count displaying incorrectly after submitting inline replies.
  • Fixed missing publish events in bulk data exports for republished content.
  • Fixed Members Online count showing inflated numbers by excluding partially registered users.
  • Fixed search results not sorting correctly by view count.
  • Fixed video sitemap XML validation errors affecting video SEO indexing.
  • Fixed usernames with certain Unicode characters causing registration failures and blank display names.
  • Fixed attachments remaining visible in the editor after sending private message replies.
  • Fixed "Show older messages" causing page reload when clicked after switching threads.
  • Fixed rank-up notifications not being delivered via email or private message.
  • Fixed abuse reports failing when member email addresses could not be resolved.
  • Fixed Admin Metrics date filter returning results outside the selected range.
  • Fixed content archival jobs getting permanently blocked when a single job encounters an error.
  • Fixed private messages with certain HTML content showing a misleading "character limit reached" error.
  • Fixed document viewer description to accurately reflect supported preview formats.
  • Fixed search box losing focus while typing, particularly with mobile keyboards or Chinese IME input.
  • Fixed external videos (Brightcove) failing with misleading "private video" error when the video provider returned an empty title.
  • Fixed content archival API returning success but silently failing to archive.
  • Fixed search bar defaulting to user search instead of content search on Hermes-themed communities.
  • Fixed product search API returning duplicate or missing results with cursor pagination.
  • Fixed @mention text inside code samples being dropped when entering edit mode.
  • Fixed notification feed showing empty state during backend timeouts instead of a descriptive error.
  • Fixed images pasted into the editor not uploading.
  • Fixed "PM the Author" button opening an empty window in moderation tools.
  • Fixed Top Solutions Authors leaderboard showing no users for time-range tabs.
  • Fixed Promoted Search results not appearing in autocomplete dropdown after 26.1 upgrade.
  • Fixed session token identifiers being exposed in HTML page source and error pages.
  • Fixed stored cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in user profile social link fields.
  • Fixed unauthenticated access permissions to the individual user API endpoint.

Aurora

  • Fixed search autocomplete not returning results for queries containing special characters.
  • Fixed @mention autocomplete not triggering when typing @ on Android mobile devices.
  • Fixed pagination links from Linear display mode failing when viewed in Threaded display mode.
  • Fixed auto-hyperlink conversion inconsistently applied when pasting URLs and pressing Enter quickly.
  • Fixed auto-title feature incorrectly formatting hyperlinks when URL was followed by punctuation.
  • Fixed attachment validation errors not being properly surfaced when the virus scanner rejected files.
  • Fixed Group Hub members with the correct role being denied access to the Manage Members page.
  • Fixed "Newest" sort on search and tag results using edit date instead of original post date.
  • Fixed TKB article publishing history not recording state changes after loading autosaved drafts.
  • Fixed Community Experience Survey CSV exports producing malformed files when responses contain special characters.
  • Fixed JavaScript error when clicking "Add a tag" on boards where a previously muted node was deleted.
  • Fixed Add Co-Author overlay not reopening after being dismissed in Blog boards.
  • Fixed Analytics reports stalling or failing for multi-day date ranges.
  • Fixed custom fields for categories and forums not appearing in the Admin UI settings panel.
  • Fixed deletion of Idea status failing when reply messages had associated status entries.
  • Fixed TAR file attachments being silently removed after publishing.
  • Fixed application crashes caused by certain HTTP header configurations.
  • Fixed internal server requests being incorrectly counted in API billing metrics.
  • Fixed category permissions page failing to load in Admin UI.
  • Fixed Blog, TKB, and Ideas article body expanding to full page width instead of the intended column width.
  • Fixed the Ideas board becoming unresponsive when the Featured Statuses widget was present.
  • Fixed tag search filter returning no results after 26.1 upgrade.
  • Fixed bulk archive search failing to create jobs.

Pre-Prod Rollout: March 17-18. Testing window open from March 18 through March 31.
Production Rollout: April 1-2 >> April 8-9 [**Updated Release Dates]

The rollout will follow the standard maintenance windows

Updated 1 month ago
Version 3.0

19 Comments

  • LucyL's avatar
    LucyL
    Khoros Staff
    1 month ago

    Hey CyJervis,I hear you - and we’ll do a better job keeping everyone in the loop when delays happen.We do all our testing on a core version, but since our customer communities are pretty different, sometimes things only show up during staging, and occasionally that’s late in the process. If we spot something that could impact a lot of customers, we’d rather take the time to fix it properly before pushing to production.We always aim to stick to the announced release dates, but we’ll be more transparent going forward if delays might happen.Appreciate your patience!

  • CyJervis's avatar
    CyJervis
    Boss
    1 month ago

    LucyL​ This is the second release in a row with a sudden delay announced. Some of us make plans around these releases for production testing in case something breaks. This last minute timeline slippage by Khoros is becoming a trend, which is concerning if issues are being noticed at the last minute, when testing on their end should have been completed well in advance to even updating staging environments. 

  • LucyL's avatar
    LucyL
    Khoros Staff
    1 month ago

    Prod roll-out has been delayed a week to April 8-9. Thank you for your patience.

  • LucyL's avatar
    LucyL
    Khoros Staff
    1 month ago

    In a few patches we will. However you can enable it on your staging as well to test the features and keep it off on your production server! You can have early access but have the AI features entirely turned off for your community.

  • Hi all, with 26.2 on our stage, we have a few findings and we are wondering if these issues are exclusively ours or general issues.

    • Username and Avatar of initial post not displayed: See screenshot, user not logged in, respectively "normal user" (admin sees both, username and avatar pic). 
    • Previously a mouse over the user avatar displayed the profile card. That does not work anymore on the message page

    Struggling with this ones

    • Previously when starting search from a boad page, search was narrowed to that board, see screenshot 

      Now, it is not consistently so. We presume, that this behaviour started before 26.2.

    • Second thing, we are wondering about: Is the range of possibilities for users with simple html permission now broader than before? With other words: Is the set of allowed HTML tags now larger than before?

    Please share, if you had similar test results or if you do not see any similar behaviour on your stage with 26.2.

  • Will these AI assisted features be enabled in community.khoros.com? or in a sandbox somewhere that we can see how it behaves?
    There is no way I'm turning on automated AI answers in a UGC-forward community without a TON of UX and Security reviews and vetting. Even if you put a human in that loop - what would the workload of that vetting then look like?

  • Nice one, those are looking great!.. Keen to test these out..