Khoros Communities 26.3 Release Notes

26.3 helps make your community a place members return to. Managers can create branded email templates tied to Orchestrator for end-to-end outreach, while Polls and Clarification Questions improve engagement and answer quality. AI Moderation is more reliable at scale. The release also adds Metric Explorer, plus search upgrades and Zoom event registration.

New Features (Aurora - Early Access)

Availability: All features in early access are behind feature flags and must be manually enabled by contacting your Customer Success Manager. They are fully configurable from the admin panel once enabled. You may enable select Early Access products.

Note: Classic users can migrate to Aurora at no cost in 2026. Contact your CSM for details.

Customizable Email Templates

Email communications from your community - registration confirmations, notification digests, workflow alerts - have historically required developer involvement to customize. Branding changes, copy updates, or new email types meant filing tickets and waiting. Community managers had no self-service control over one of the most direct channels for bringing members back.

What you can do now: Create and manage branded, customizable email templates directly from the admin panel. With full control over content, layout, and branding, no developer dependencies required.

Template creation & management

• Self-service editor for creating and customizing email templates with branding, custom content, and layout control.
• Organize templates with categories and search for easy management at scale.
• Customize emails across community communications - including registration, notifications, and workflow-triggered emails.

Orchestrator integration

• Created templates can be accessed directly in Orchestrator automation rules — when a trigger fires (such as User Registers, Solution Accepted, Topic Posted, or Role Granted), the Orchestrator sends your branded template automatically.
• Visual compatibility indicators show which templates work with which triggers, with placeholder validation against available data.

Enablement: All existing community emails continue to function without any changes. To adopt the new system, the Khoros team runs a migration script that generates your templates. You review and sign off on the migrated templates, and only after your approval does the Khoros team activate the new flow. Contact your CSM to begin the process.

Proactive Clarification Questions for Answer Assist

Helps members get better, faster answers by guiding them to provide the right context upfront without adding friction to the posting experience.

• Post-publish flow: Posts publish as per the moderation settings. For question-type posts, the system surfaces AI-generated clarification questions in a slide-in panel (desktop) or bottom sheet (mobile).
• CM-guided generation: Community managers provide example clarification questions to guide the AI. The system then generates both the questions and suggested answer options dynamically, informed by post content and community knowledge.
• Configurable and optional: Admins set the maximum number of questions per board (default 3, max 6). All questions are optional. Members can answer any, all, or none, and skip the entire step while posting the question.

Polls

Enable members to share opinions and surface community sentiment through lightweight, interactive polls - giving community managers structured insight into what members think and need.

• Creation: Create text or image-based polls directly from the message editor on Forum, Blog, and Group boards. It supports 2–8 options and durations from 1 hour to 1 month.
• Image polls: Support for image-based options with responsive grid layout, alt text, and lightbox preview, ideal for visual preference assessment on design concepts, product options, or community decisions.
• One-click voting: Real-time result updates with percentage breakdowns and social proof. Configurable for single-vote or multi-vote, with optional vote-change support.
• Results visibility controls: Set results to public, participants + creator only, or creator-only with configurable exposure timing (after voting, live, or after poll closes).
• Admin controls: Board-level enable/disable, configurable limits (duration, options, characters), minimum rank and account age gating for poll creators, and standard moderation pipeline integration.
• Notifications & analytics: Poll-closed email notifications to creators and voters. Per-poll CSV export and community-wide aggregate statistics available from the admin panel. Voting history visible on member profiles.

Metric Explorer

A new dedicated analytics experience for deeper, more flexible analysis of community metrics. Metric Explorer lets you select any supported metric and slice it by multiple dimensions such as board, content type, role, or time period with comparative views that show trends side-by-side. Key capabilities include:

• Slice-and-dice: Break down any metric by dimensions like board, content type, user role, language, and custom date ranges.
• Comparative analysis: Compare metrics across time periods, boards, or segments to identify trends and performance shifts.
• Extended date ranges: Metric Explorer supports date ranges beyond 90 days up to one full year with interval-based charting. For example, DAU/MAU now displays as a full time-series chart in Metric Explorer (rather than the single aggregate value shown on the main dashboard).
• Full metric catalog: A comprehensive guide to all available metrics, their definitions, supported dimensions, and slice-and-dice options will be published alongside this release (see Guides section below).
• Search Analytics dashboard: New analytics dashboard providing visibility into search performance including search volume, success rates, top search terms, zero-result queries, filter usage, and board-level search metrics with drill-down and time period selection.

Expert Report

• Expert Scoring & Top Experts List: Discover and filter top experts per topic with a ranked list (configurable up to top 10 per topic). Filter by topic category or staff/community role, with CSV export. AI profiles are automatically excluded.

Enhancements (Aurora)

Search

• Multi-select filters: Members can now select multiple values in Content Type, Author, and other filter categories to create targeted search queries. Admins can enable this via the Features tab. For multi-tag filtering, admins can choose between AND/OR filtering; for Content Type and Author, OR filtering is applied.
• Author Search: Search by community member name to surface all posts and replies created by that user, enabling quick content discovery and contributor insights.

AI Platform

• Auto-exclude banned users from expert recommendations: Permanently banned, temporarily suspended, and deactivated users are automatically filtered from the expert recommendation pipeline before expert cards are displayed or notifications are sent.
• Expert and clarification events for Orchestrator: Expert identification events and clarification question nudge events are now published to the Orchestrator, enabling custom workflows, such as routing expert invitations through branded email templates or automating follow-up when members haven't completed clarification questions.
• Prioritized Knowledge Base and Blog sources in AI answers: Answer Assist now prioritizes KB articles and blog posts over forum replies when generating cited answers, improving answer authority and accuracy.
• Configurable citations card title: Community admins can customize the "Citations" heading on AI answer cards to match their brand (e.g., "Sources," "References," "Learn More") from AI Settings.
• Configurable multi-modal vision models: Admins can configure multi-modal vision models for AI image analysis directly from the AI Settings page, now fully integrated into the AI moderation pipeline.
• Khoros Managed Key support for AI Moderation: Communities can now enable AI Moderation using Khoros-provided API keys instead of bringing their own LLM service credentials, simplifying onboarding and reducing setup overhead. The AI Settings UI hides model selection and API key fields when Khoros Managed Keys are in use.

Analytics

• Extended date ranges for key dashboard metrics: The main Analytics dashboard now supports date ranges greater than 90 days (up to one year) for New vs. Returning Members and New vs. Returning Anonymous Users previously limited to 90 days.
• Survey Bulk API: Survey response data is now available in the Bulk Data API v3 for Aurora, enabling historical NPS and ROI measurement with backfill of existing survey data.

Events & Authentication

• Zoom event registration integration: When members RSVP to events in the community, registration data (name, email, title, company, phone) is automatically pushed to Zoom's registrant list via API. Community managers link events to Zoom webinar IDs. Data then flows through to Salesforce via customers' existing Zoom–Salesforce integrations. Setup: An admin must complete the Zoom OAuth authorization in the admin panel to enable the data flow.
• Mandatory SSO registration completion: SSO registration can now be configured to require completing registration fields and accepting terms and conditions before account activation. Previously, SSO sign-up could bypass these steps. Setup: An admin must enable this setting in the SSO configuration panel.

Platform

• UTF-8 BOM for CSV exports: Analytics CSV exports now include a UTF-8 BOM header, resolving display issues with non-English characters when opening files directly in Microsoft Excel.
• Pendo integration removal: Removed all Pendo tracking code from Aurora and Classic platforms. In-product admin guides previously powered by Pendo are no longer available. This change has no impact on community member experience or community functionality.
• Naming updates: "Community Automations" has been renamed to "Orchestrator" throughout the admin interface, and all UI references to the AI answer feature now consistently use "Answer Assist."

AI Moderation Improvements (Aurora)

This release delivers a significant round of improvements to the AI Moderation and Appeals systems introduced in 26.2 giving admins more control, improving moderation reliability, and making the appeals experience smoother for members.

Greater Admin Control

• Global kill switch: A new master toggle on the AI Settings page instantly disables AI moderation across all boards, regardless of board-level settings. Re-enabling restores your existing per-board configuration automatically.
• Clearer confidence threshold settings: Replaced the confidence threshold slider with a dropdown control at the community level for easier, more precise configuration.
• Transparent bypass permissions: Added disclaimers to permission descriptions that implicitly bypass AI moderation, so admins can clearly see which roles skip the moderation pipeline.

More Reliable Moderation Decisions

• Board-level settings honored: Resolved multiple issues where AI moderation was triggered on boards with the toggle disabled, posts were incorrectly auto-approved or auto-rejected, and community-level settings unintentionally overrode board-level configuration.
• Deny-default forums: Fixed AI moderation not triggering for users with role-based visibility permissions on forums using deny-default access.
• Multi-image posts: Posts with multiple images are now moderated reliably through chunked processing, preventing failures on image-heavy content.

Improved Appeals Experience

• Appeals for human-moderated posts: Members can now appeal posts rejected by human moderators not just AI-moderated rejections.
• Correct appeal reason display: Moderation audit and member-facing panels now correctly display appeal reason codes and descriptions.
• User-friendly error messages: Appeal submission errors now show clear, actionable messages instead of generic error text.

Admin UX Fixes

• Community guidelines editor: The guidelines editor now displays a character limit indicator and enforces a maximum length, resolving lag and "Failed to save" errors with very large text. Also fixed text area resize issues and empty submission validation.
• "Hide from View": Fixed the button showing a success message but not actually removing moderated posts from the list.
• Manage Content ellipsis menu: Fixed the overflow menu disappearing on hover and remaining in an active state after selecting an option.

Bug Fixes

Aurora

• Post approval badges now auto-dismiss after a few seconds instead of persisting indefinitely; badge labels are standardized across Forums, Blogs, and Knowledge Base articles, and misleading "Approved" indicators on already-published content have been suppressed.
• Fixed navigation links being overwritten instead of appended when more than 10 links were added to the community header.
• Fixed Group Hub membership UI not properly displaying or managing membership actions.
• Fixed thread widget crashing when moderators clicked Approve or Reject directly within the thread view.
• Fixed topic tags briefly appearing and then disappearing after page load.
• Fixed avatar images displaying at incorrect resolutions due to size variants colliding in the cache.
• Fixed Contributions widget on user profiles always defaulting to Newest Topics regardless of the configured default.
• Fixed board sort preference not persisting across page loads for anonymous and SSO-authenticated users.
• Fixed moderation status banner not rendering on the message page.
• Fixed user profile page crashing when registration data was missing for certain users.
• Fixed viewport scroll jumping unexpectedly after saving image ALT text.
• Fixed infinite reload loop after creating a blog post.
• Fixed search results infinite scroll stalling after the first 20 results.
• Fixed brief "No Replies" empty state flash appearing while replies were still loading after the 26.1 upgrade.
• Fixed search input becoming invisible after browser Back navigation while the dropdown remained visible.
• Fixed label links on search results pages not responding to clicks when the label filter widget was absent.
• Fixed survey text override in the admin Q&A modal showing a misleading "admin app does not allow customizations" error.
• Fixed Answer Assist search failing for communities using Khoros-managed API keys.
• Fixed Answer Assist not generating responses for posts created by users with bypass-moderation permissions.
• Fixed Display Name field in Answer Assist settings not updating in the UI after saving.
• Fixed GraphQL Follows API targetId filter returning follows for all boards instead of only the specified target.
• Fixed React hydration errors on the Manage Content tabs.
• Fixed Template Card not supporting scrolling, and filter selections resetting on navigation.
• Fixed sub-category and date selections reverting to previous values after saving.
• Fixed canonical URLs on profile and label-filtered forum pages including query parameters, causing search engines to index parameterized variations as separate pages.
• Fixed appeals UI disappearing from the moderation interface after deployments.
• Added GraphQL alias count limit to prevent resource amplification attacks via excessive query aliases.
• Added authorization check to the RSVP delete mutation to prevent unauthorized record deletion.
• Added missing authorization checks to GraphQL customization mutations.
• Replaced semantically incorrect aside spacer with a div in the message view card to comply with WCAG 1.3.1.
• Fixed tag focus indicator contrast ratio to meet WCAG 1.4.11 requirements.
• Added underline decoration to user profile links in the message view byline to comply with WCAG 1.4.1.

Classic

• Fixed MESSAGE_TYPE field returning null in some GraphQL responses.
• Fixed rank field missing from REST API v1/v2 responses for newly created users.
• Fixed tag cloud widget ignoring its configured maximum tag count setting.
• Fixed private message content filter notifications not posting to the report board.
• Fixed full-page Products and Places search failing to match partial terms within compound names containing separators.
• Fixed archive totalCount returning the page-local size instead of the actual total number of archived items.
• Fixed label validation being skipped when the label.labels parameter was omitted from requests.
• Fixed REST API search queries triggering live rank recalculation, which sent unintended mass email notifications to users whose ranks changed.
• Fixed orphaned message-level float records remaining after a thread's global float was removed, leaving threads pinned at the board level.
• Changed RSVP email calendar invite method from REQUEST to PUBLISH to prevent non-functional Accept/Decline prompts in email clients.
• Increased board ID maximum length from 40 to 255 characters.
• Fixed NullPointerException in the video gallery component on pages accessed without a user context.
• Fixed quilt flattener producing duplicate components when class names changed between versions.
• Fixed Elasticsearch bookmark race condition during rolling upgrades that triggered unnecessary full index backfills.
• Fixed Idea Exchange search defaulting to the parent category scope instead of the current board.
• Fixed Redis connection pool not rebuilding automatically after connection failures.
• Fixed inbox infinite scroll stalling after 30 conversations.
• Fixed REST API ban operation failing for admin users who had never logged in through the UI.
• Fixed attachment Show More button not functioning in draft preview mode.
• Fixed Elasticsearch full refill operations exiting prematurely after the first chunk.
• Fixed NullPointerException when viewing abuse reports for deleted private messages.
• Fixed clipboard image paste creating a placeholder but never uploading the image in the V2 editor.
• Fixed file descriptor leak when journal entry write operations failed.
• Fixed list-style-type formatting being stripped from nested lists during content sanitization, which caused extra list items to appear after saving posts with multi-level indentation.
• Fixed emoji picker panel closing immediately when opened on mobile devices.
• Fixed Grammarly extension blocking the TinyMCE editor resize controls.
• Fixed hard-coded English labels in the Private Notes threaded view options menu.
• Added figure and figcaption elements to the server-side HTML whitelist so image captions are preserved after saving.
• Fixed GNU tar attachments being silently dropped due to MIME type mismatch.
• Fixed multiple rapid attachment uploads silently dropping files; pending uploads are now queued and processed sequentially.
• Added lowercase route alias for the Critical CSS callback endpoint to handle CDN providers that send lowercased URLs.
• Fixed tags disappearing when editing custom fields on TKB draft articles.
• Added a maximum retry limit for Akismet spam processing failures to prevent unbounded queue growth during service disruptions.
• Fixed object tag previews not rendering in the TinyMCE rich text editor.
• Fixed Members Online count fluctuating erratically across page loads.
• Fixed PageOutOfRangeException when navigating to certain blog comment permalinks.
• Fixed scheduled member reports missing columns when exports exceeded 2,000 lines.
• Fixed Traditional Chinese (zh-TW) and Simplified Chinese (zh-CN) translation files being swapped, causing the wrong script variant to display.
• Fixed expensive MySQL COUNT query causing CPU spikes on the message view threads table.
• Fixed orphaned cover images remaining after moving a blog post to a non-blog board.
• Fixed registration form being misidentified as a login form by password managers, causing autofill of existing credentials instead of new credential generation.
• Fixed case-sensitive query parameter lookup causing guide URLs to redirect to the wrong KB article.
• Fixed approved posts reappearing in the moderation queue after being processed.
• Fixed anonymous user access check blocking authenticated users from looking up their own profile data through the API.
• Fixed application failures during startup caused by Flow app initialization errors.
• Fixed persistent stored cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability via HTML sanitizer bypass.
• Fixed server-side request forgery (SSRF) vulnerability in the Classic REST image upload endpoint via the upload_url parameter.
• Enforced REST v2 Users API access controls so personally identifiable fields are no longer exposed to unauthorized callers.
• Added per-field access control to prevent anonymous PII exposure in user profile API responses.
• Fixed personal information exports leaking settings-scoped custom content values that should not have been part of user data.

Pre-Prod Rollout: May 12-13. Testing window open from May 14 through May 25. 
Production Rollout: May 27-28 

The rollout will follow the standard maintenance windows.