26.4 brings the Aurora homepage to life. Members can now react, reply inline, and save content directly from the feed without navigating away, while cross-board posting lets anyone start a discussion from any page in the community. Managers get a safe mode to evaluate Answer Assist quality before enabling it for members. Across Classic and Aurora, the release also delivers security patches, search fixes, and broad editor and stability improvements.

New Features

Aurora - Early Access Features

The features in this section are available in Early Access for Aurora communities. They are behind feature flags and must be manually enabled — contact your Customer Success Manager to begin. Once enabled, all features are fully configurable from the admin panel. 

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

• Cross-Board Posting: Members can now start a post from the homepage or any category or landing page — no more navigating deep into the community structure to find the right board.

• • Start a Discussion CTA — Admins enable a posting button on any page template via the Designer Tool. Button text is configurable (default: "Start a Discussion").
  • Permission-aware board picker — A searchable flat list showing only boards the user has permission to post on. Private group boards are hidden from non-members.
  • All content types supported — discussions, blog articles, KB articles, ideas, and events.
  • If clicked from within a specific board, that board is pre-selected in the picker.
  • Anonymous users see the button but are redirected to sign-in on click

• Interactive Social Feed: Aurora's homepage Feed section transforms from a static list of post titles into a living, social feed where members can participate without breaking their browsing flow.

• • Inline comment expansion — Click "See details" on any post to expand and read the latest comments directly in the feed. New/unread comments are surfaced first with clear visual highlighting.
  • Inline replies — Reply to any discussion directly from the homepage feed using the same rich editor and community settings as the full thread view.
  • Full post view — Expand the complete post body within the feed context; navigate to the full thread only when you need deeper engagement.
  • Infinite scroll — The feed auto-loads additional posts as you scroll, with admin-configurable batch sizes and load limits.
  • Admin controls: Enable or disable the interactive feed globally or per board from Admin → Settings → Content Features → Homepage Social Feed. Configure comment display count, infinite scroll batch size, and pilot specific boards before rolling out community-wide. One-click emergency disable option if issues arise
  • Multi-Semantic Reactions: Move beyond a single "Like" and let members express nuanced sentiment.
    • Reaction types include: Need This, Helpful, Insightful, Celebrate, and more — configurable per community.
    • Reaction picker appears inline on posts and comments in the feed and full thread views.
    • Members who react with "I Need This" automatically follow the thread and receive notifications when a solution is posted.
    • Reaction counts display in real time; notification messages explain why members are receiving updates.

• • Save & Follow — Inline Feed Actions: Members can now manage their personal content queue directly from the feed.

• • • Save/Bookmark — Save any post to "My Stuff" with a single click. Add private bookmark notes.
    • Follow/Unfollow — Follow threads for notifications; unfollow directly from the feed at any time.
    • Bulk unfollow — Manage followed content at scale.
    • Auto-follow — Members who react with "I Need This" are automatically subscribed to solution notifications.

• Admin Review Mode for AI Answer Assist: Community managers can now safely test Answer Assist quality on live production data without any impact on member experience.

• • Review Mode toggle — Enable per board in Answer Assist settings. The toggle label dynamically reflects the current state: "Enable Review Mode" when off, "Enable Live Mode" when on.
  • Shadow processing — Answer Assist generates answers normally but routes them to the Answer Queue for admin review instead of posting to members.
  • Zero member impact — No answers posted, no expert notifications triggered, no AA UI rendered for members in review mode.
  • Answer Queue — Review mode entries are labeled "REVIEW MODE" and include the generated answer content and identified expert names.

• Answer Requests Opt-Out: Experts can now opt out of automatic question routing when they don't want routed questions. (feature flagged with Answer Assist)
• Likes & Reactions Email Notifications: Notify users by email when their posts receive likes or reactions (feature-flagged with the social feed).

Classic

• Newest Sort for Knowledge Base Tags: Sort knowledge base Tag Results by newest post date.

Classic and Aurora

• Custom Embed Extension Point: Add custom embed integrations to the rich text editor toolbar in a supported, generic way.

Classic

Security

• Fixed private message images being viewable without logging in. (Classic and Aurora)
• Fixed an attachment upload issue that could let a file be served with an unsafe content type.
• Fixed SAML SSO not enforcing the required-signature setting on assertions.
• Fixed anonymous API access that could expose private, moderation-held message data.
• Fixed the kudos revoke API returning a business error instead of an authentication error for unauthenticated requests.
• Added autocomplete hints to the registration form to prevent incorrect credential autofill.
• Fixed OAuth callbacks double-encoding the state parameter, which strict clients could reject.

Accessibility

• Fixed flat heading levels on Classic profile and widget pages for screen readers.
• Exposed the rich text editor body as a labeled multiline textbox for screen readers.
• Fixed keyboard focus getting stuck in the rich text editor toolbar at high zoom levels.
• Fixed keyboard tab order so the Labels field is reachable before Post and Cancel on the compose page.
• Added a visible required-field indicator and aria-required to the compose message Subject field.
• Exposed the rich text editor list and text-color controls as split buttons to screen readers.
• Added a visible tooltip when keyboard focus lands on a rich text editor toolbar control.
• Rendered Help FAQ procedural step labels as proper headings for screen readers.

Search

• Fixed an exact-title search match not appearing in results.
• Fixed the search auto-suggest dropdown not appearing on some communities.
• Fixed board search returning stale category results after a board was moved.
• Fixed product and managed-tag search returning no results for certain multi-part terms.
• Fixed full-text search not preserving compound terms joined by hyphens or slashes. (Classic and Aurora)
• Fixed search dropping trailing terms in some multi-term queries. (Classic and Aurora)
• Improved REST API search response times for large result sets.

Analytics

• Restored Community Analytics traffic tracking (Page Views, Visits, Unique Visitors). (Classic and Aurora)
• Fixed inflated "Members Online" counts caused by automated traffic.
• Fixed Community Analytics failing to launch on sites that disable tickets on GET requests.
• Fixed Topic Posted, Topic Updated, and Topic Deleted analytics events firing twice.

Editor & Content

• Restored fullscreen playback for external videos inserted via Insert Video from the web.
• Fixed the rich text editor body expanding uncontrollably and blocking posting on some environments.
• Fixed image captions not displaying for knowledge base authors and readers.
• Fixed Vimeo embeds showing a [video] placeholder after publishing.
• Fixed image and custom-width slider issues in the editor.
• Fixed a moved root Blog post redirecting to a restricted board instead of showing the moved-content placeholder.
• Fixed the Draft filter on Knowledge Base and Blog dashboards showing published articles.

Notifications & Email

• Fixed missing workflow notification emails for blog articles awaiting review.
• Fixed subscribers not being notified when a subscribed message was moved to a new topic.
• Fixed edit notifications not respecting the Notify Followers setting in some cases.
• Fixed a missing notification-tracking record for a subscribed reply.
• Fixed inconsistent Notification Feed counts depending on which server served the request.
• Fixed button alignment not being honored in rendered email HTML.
• Fixed several bugs in Email Template Management.
• Made the email Template Card scrollable and preserved its filter selection.

Moderation

• Restored report-board notifications for Content Filter deny events.
• Fixed private message content-filter notifications not posting to the report board.
• Fixed a server error after hiding a message from Spam Quarantine.
• Fixed Moderation Manager reusing a stale Spam reject reason.
• Restored dismissing the spam and moderation preview modal with Escape or an outside click.

API

• Fixed REST API v2 Search not consistently enforcing result-size limits on expanded data.
• Fixed REST API v1 metadata pagination duplicating results past a large offset.
• Fixed the user-creation API response missing the rank field.
• Fixed the messages API ignoring the "sort by kudos received" option.
• Fixed predefined labels losing their configured letter case in the API.
• Fixed anonymous search requests omitting a user's registration date when access was enabled.
• Fixed missing user profile fields on parent-message-author activity log entries.
• Fixed the Images API returning a server error when querying a deleted board.
• Fixed the Images API's upload-time range query omitting valid images.

Core Fixes

• Fixed a server error when following the Article Contributions link after logging in.
• Fixed abuse reports submitted by anonymous users not being recorded.
• Fixed Private Messages content being clipped at high browser zoom levels.
• Fixed server errors on kudos button links on certain pages.
• Fixed an error when moving an individual Events comment to another Events board.
• Fixed board sort order not honoring the latest-activity timestamp.
• Fixed a server error when opening an archived thread with a soft-deleted nested message.
• Fixed duplicate or inconsistent reply state caused by orphaned data rows.
• Fixed unanswered-thread auto-escalation stalling behind a single failed topic.
• Fixed the Top Solution Authors widget rendering empty on the board page.
• Restored location autocomplete suggestions in event location fields.
• Fixed the tag cloud size setting not limiting the number of tags shown on posts.
• Fixed sub-category and date fields not updating correctly.
• Fixed SSO registration setting visibility and improved its admin configuration.
• Fixed Product Catalog Sync deleting products that were present in the uploaded file.
• Fixed a consecutive-login badge not being awarded due to undercounted login streaks.
• Fixed Q&A structured data pointing the accepted-answer link to the author's profile instead of the answer.
• Fixed Japanese short-month names rendering incorrectly on some servers.

Performance & Stability

• Fixed a memory leak that could cause periodic Classic server downtime.
• Fixed a memory leak from deleted boards that caused gradual slowdowns.
• Fixed a session-handling race condition that caused intermittent server errors.
• Fixed a backlog of stale video records delaying new video uploads.
• Fixed a search indexing issue where malformed data could stall indexing.
• Fixed a homepage error that could occur after moving a threaded reply.
• Improved tag-cloud widget performance to avoid slow scans.
• Improved loading performance of the message and topics view. (Classic and Aurora)
• Improved performance of previous/next image navigation, especially in large galleries. (Classic and Aurora)
• Fixed a memory leak when processing animated GIF images. (Classic and Aurora)
• Improved reliability of video integrations when the provider rate-limits requests. (Classic and Aurora)
• Fixed large GDPR content export downloads timing out. (Classic and Aurora)

Aurora

Enhancements

AI Answer Assist

• Expert Opt-Out for Answer Requests — Community members identified as experts can now opt out of receiving Answer Request notifications globally or per topic. Admins can remove specific users from the expert pool. The routing algorithm respects opt-out status before selecting experts, gracefully falling back to the next available expert. 
• Simplified Answer Confidence Threshold — Reduced to three plain-language options — Moderate (Recommended), High, and Extreme — with percentage values removed. "Moderate" is now the default for new and unconfigured communities, applied in both the main AI Settings page and the per-board settings modal.
• Hide Post Relevancy Threshold — The post relevancy threshold input has been removed from the AI Settings UI. It defaults to 50 and can be overridden via config key for communities that need tuning.
• "Expert Report" Rename — "Experts Leaderboard" is renamed to "Expert Report" throughout the Aurora admin UI.

Email Templates

• Template Version Lifecycle Management — Community managers can now mark templates and individual versions as active or inactive, preventing inactive versions from triggering unintended automation. Clone, rename, and delete versions directly from the template manager.
• Digest Notification Emails — Digest notification emails are now supported within the Email Templates system with their own default templates and configurable variables. Previously handled outside the template system due to complexity.
• Reactions Email Template — Communities with the Social Feed enabled now have a dedicated email template for reaction notifications, replacing the legacy Kudos email when Social Feed is active. Includes post byline, title, and styled reaction chips — customizable via a new Reactions content block in the email editor. Communities not using Social Feed see no change to existing Kudos emails.
• "Post Templates" Rename — "Workflow Templates" has been renamed to "Post Templates" throughout the email templates interface for clarity.

AI Moderation

• Poll AI Moderation — Quick Poll content is now submitted to the AI moderation pipeline. Poll question text, answer options, image alt text, captions, and image URLs are all inspected. Polls are durably requeued for moderation after creation; poll voteability is blocked until creation-time moderation completes.
• Quick Poll Content Checked by Akismet — For communities using Akismet without AI moderation enabled, Quick Poll content is now submitted to Akismet as part of the poll creation flow. A rejected poll-bearing post keeps the poll non-voteable.
• Moderation Queue AI Filters — "AI Flagged" and confidence threshold filters in the moderation queue now correctly narrow results. aiVerdict and aiConfidence are now indexed on the message search index.

Clarification Questions

• Clarification Answer Moderation Unified with Standard AI Flow — Clarification question answers are now processed through the same AI moderation pipeline used for regular posts and replies, ensuring consistent pre-moderation, post-moderation, bypass, and moderation-off behavior across all content types. Rejecting a clarification answer hides that answer only; the parent post is unaffected.

Others

• WebP Image Uploads: Upload images in WebP format without the upload being rejected.

Bug Fixes

Answer Assist

• Fixed raw HTML markup appearing inside Answer Assist citation snippets shown to members.
• Fixed extra blank lines appearing in AI-generated answers.
• Fixed Answer Assist generating duplicate AI replies when a post is edited mid-response.
• Fixed Answer Assist running on boards not selected in Target Sources, incorrectly surfacing "expert notified" notifications.
• Fixed filtered-out citations appearing in the citations list.
• Fixed Answer Assist using citations not present in the current CLM build.
• Fixed Answer Assist using low-relevance citations in answer generation.
• Fixed expert suggestions remaining visible after an AI answer succeeded on retry.
• Fixed missing Answer Assist translations in the enduser app for several locales.
• Fixed retry failures around Answer Assist reply creation.
• Fixed ai_auto_reply.metadata_write_enabled defaulting to FALSE; now correctly defaults to TRUE.
• Fixed Answer Assist not recognizing Khoros Managed Key configuration, resolving "API key is not configured" errors for communities using Khoros-provided keys.
• Fixed Expert Notification event not firing when an AI answer is generated on a board with a timer delay.
• Improved reliability of AI answer generation during brief service slowdowns.

Clarification Questions

• Fixed Clarification Questions not generating on boards where only the primary LLM is configured with no fallback.
• Fixed Clarification answers failing to save when an admin used "Switch Member" to act as another user.
• Fixed Clarification Review admin pages failing on communities without Lithium Studio enabled.
• Fixed Clarification classifier mis-parsing LLM output and treating nearly every post as a question.
• Fixed multiple Clarification defects: board settings accuracy, bulk enable/disable, reminder behaviour, abandonment handling, and lost answer submissions.
• Fixed Clarification Questions not coordinating with Answer Assist when board answer delay is set to 0.
• Fixed Clarification Questions surfacing about details already stated in the original post.
• Fixed Clarification Questions not generating on boards where Answer Assist is disabled but Clarification Questions are independently enabled.
• Fixed Clarification UI appearing on admin home page; now gated to message pages only.
• Fixed category-level clarification settings not reflected in board-level display, showing a misleading "disabled" state when settings were inherited from the parent.
• Fixed CM Guidance Examples allowing duplicate entries with no validation.
• Fixed clarification state and questions not visible to admins on post detail pages; now accessible directly without navigating to the Clarification Review console.
• Short clarification answers — yes, no, n/a, or a single number — are now accepted.

AI Moderation

• Fixed moderation status incorrectly showing "AI: Pending" for content on boards where AI moderation is disabled or skipped; now correctly shows "AI: Disabled" or "AI: Skipped".
• Fixed Spam and Other reject reason options missing from the reject dropdown for replies in threaded view.
• Hardened AI moderation background sweeper against stuck-row failures.
• Fixed wrong info message shown when content is rejected as Abuse by a Moderator.
• Fixed AI moderation global kill switch taking 15–60 seconds to take effect due to missing cache invalidation; now takes effect immediately.
• Created an extension point for message-attached components to participate in the AI moderation pipeline.
• Updated AI moderation "under review" banner copy.
• Fixed AI Settings toggles breaking when configuration failed to load or returned an empty response.

Events

• Fixed registration cancellations in Aurora not syncing to Zoom, leaving registrant counts incorrect.
• Fixed registrations by partially registered users not being pushed to Zoom.
• Fixed anonymous users getting an "Error Rendering Component" crash when opening event pages.
• Fixed Zoom event date and time not being auto-fetched when linking a meeting to a community event.
• Fixed missing validation for Zoom vs. community event time, type, and meeting ownership mismatches.

Email Templates

• Fixed email template editor showing a success confirmation without actually saving; errors now surface correctly.
• Fixed not being redirected back to the template list after deleting the last template.
• Fixed four Digest email editor issues: layout rendering, preview display, variable substitution, and save/publish behaviour.
• Fixed Undo action incorrectly clearing original text when reverting a block duplication or close action.
• Fixed unsubscribe URL in email templates not resolving correctly, ensuring opt-out links in community emails function as expected.
• Fixed the Send Email Orchestrator action firing for triggers not configured to the Immediately cadence.
• Fixed button alignment issues; added support for placing two buttons on the same line; fixed image alignment discrepancies between edit mode and preview.

Orchestrator

• Fixed rule description having no character limit, causing lag and "Error updating fields" on save.
• Fixed duplicate condition validation, webhook header banner, THEN blocks warning, cancel confirmation dialog, and HTML rendering in email preview.

Polls

• Fixed adding a poll image to a post incorrectly stripping the main post's featured image on publish.
• Fixed Polls appearing as questions in the AI Answer Assist log.

Designer

• Fixed icons and user avatars appearing stretched and distorted in Designer → Page Templates device preview mode.

SSO & Registration

• Fixed SSO registration field configuration showing "Private Notes Consent" instead of "Privacy Policy"; field is now hidden when no Privacy Policy is configured.

Search

• Fixed searching for a board by its exact name returning no results.
• Fixed Manage Content search dropping trailing terms when combining subject text with an author filter.

Platform

• Added quill-resize-image to Aurora allowed dependencies, unblocking image resize capability in the rich text editor.
• Fixed a page crash on certain pages following a framework upgrade.
• Fixed navbar theme styling not applying consistently across pages.
• Fixed the Cancel button showing a raw translation key in a report modal.
• Fixed the API returning null instead of an empty connection for non-null connection queries.

Security

• Stripped EXIF metadata, including GPS and device information, from image attachments on upload.
• Fixed an untranslated technical label on the SAML sign-in page.

Accessibility

• Improved keyboard focus visibility on tags in High Contrast mode.
• Added a visible keyboard-focus indicator in the inline message view (WCAG 2.4.7).
• Added visible keyboard-focus indicators to the emoji picker toolbar controls.
• Added a forced-colors (high-contrast) fallback for overlay button styling (WCAG 1.4.11).
• Added meaningful alt text to the community brand logo based on the community title (WCAG 1.1.1).
• Added a contextual accessible label to the Solved badge for screen readers.

Moderation & Appeals

• Restored Spam and Other reject reasons for replies in threaded view.
• Fixed Approve and Reject actions being hidden in the moderation overflow menu.
• Made the Review Mode toggle state easier to see at a glance.
• Fixed Review Mode board-override count and selection cascade behavior.
• Fixed stale reason codes appearing in the abuse-report banner.
• Fixed the Ban Member action appearing for users who are already banned.
• Added full citation details to Admin Review Mode.
• Fixed the appeal decision button being hidden from non-admin message authors.
• Hid the "Appeal Again" button once a user reaches the appeal limit.
• Hid an AI-only appeals setting when AI moderation is disabled.
• Fixed the Appeals tab crashing on refresh and a redirect issue.
• Fixed the Appeals tab label not being translated in the account menu.
• Changed the "In Review" Banner so it will not longer display with "selective moderation" and will only show when you have the "Required" moderation style enabled.

Search

• Fixed a crash when paging through more board search results.
• Fixed searching for a board by its exact name returning no results.
• Fixed "Newest" search sorting by last-edited date instead of original post date.
• Fixed a potential crash in search-term handling.

Analytics & Metrics

• Fixed indefinite loading on the Active Users and Members Traffic detail modals.
• Fixed the DAU/MAU Ratio detail modal flickering against its previous-period value.
• Renamed Metrics Explorer's "Group Hub" label to "Group".
• Renamed the Compare modal's "Select All" option to reflect its 10-metric limit.
• Clarified that the "Survey Helpful Yes Then" metric reports a count.
• Included categories and group hubs in the Analytics dashboard place-picker search.
• Fixed the analytics popup not closing after a request-to-join action.
• Re-enabled Aurora survey analytics events.
• Added view tracking for the split-view inline reading pane.
• Fixed missing Aurora node links in the CIC API for non-board nodes.

Editor & Content

• Fixed extra empty paragraphs appearing when pasting plain text into the editor.
• Fixed Source View corrupting code blocks containing angle brackets or here-doc syntax.
• Restored the anchor-link icon on Blog and Knowledge Base article headings.
• Enabled the image-resize plugin in the rich text editor for Aurora.
• Prevented saving a knowledge base article before attachments finish uploading.
• Fixed draft Knowledge Base articles losing tags when custom fields were edited.
• Unified the edit and preview canvas for a more consistent editing experience.

Email & Notifications

• Fixed several issues in the digest email editor. (Classic and Aurora)
• Required a fallback message before saving or publishing a digest email. (Classic and Aurora)
• Fixed a broken destination after deleting the last version of an email template. (Classic and Aurora)
• Routed the unsubscribe link through notification settings and removed the external-URL option. (Classic and Aurora)
• Migrated digest emails onto the email template system.
• Preserved entered text when undoing a duplicate or close in the email template editor.
• Surfaced an error instead of a false success when saving an email template with an empty subject.
• Fixed the Send Email action firing for triggers not set to the Immediately cadence.
• Renamed the "Workflow" email-template category to "Post".
• Fixed the notification bell not updating on Recent Posts.
• Fixed broken reply links in plain-text subscription emails when the title contains a curly apostrophe.

Registration & SSO

• Fixed Group Hub email invites failing for new SSO users mid-registration.
• Fixed the Register control intermittently showing the local sign-up form instead of external SSO.
• Made SSO-managed name fields read-only instead of hidden and excluded them from submission.
• Fixed the password-reset page failing when anonymous API access is disabled.
• Gated the SSO Private Notes Consent field on the Direct Message consent setting.

Polls

• Fixed adding a poll image removing the main post's image on publish.
• Fixed additional poll bugs and removed the sign-in requirement to vote.

API

• Fixed REST v2 API queries selecting the same field at multiple nesting levels.
• Fixed the API returning null instead of an empty result for non-null connection queries.
• Fixed the API returning null for a valid user's private statistics.
• Fixed the user API role-exclusion filter returning users it should exclude.

Core Fixes

• Fixed an error when moving a reply to a different board.
• Fixed signed-in users getting an error page when browsing tag pages.
• Fixed signed-out users landing on a broken create-content page across boards.
• Fixed a page crash affecting some pages after a framework upgrade.
• Fixed the Page Builder editor crashing when selecting a custom Text/HTML widget.
• Fixed a crash when an optimistically-rendered reply has no moderation data yet. (Classic and Aurora)
• Fixed a crash when hovering over an anonymous blog author's profile link.
• Fixed a server error that broke Featured Content and Related Content widgets.
• Fixed the Inbox stopping after about 45 conversations.
• Fixed the "Show More" link on Idea boards not loading additional results.
• Fixed the @-mention suggestion dropdown closing itself in the reply editor.
• Fixed the @-mention autosuggest not appearing on Android mobile browsers.
• Fixed Related Content links not following external redirects when clicked in-app.
• Fixed hidden-board content still appearing on an author's public profile and activity pages.
• Fixed the Cancel button showing a raw translation key in a report modal.
• Fixed a duplicated reaction tooltip and added one-click liking.
• Fixed navbar theme styling not applying consistently.
• Fixed several issues in the cross-board posting destination picker.
• Fixed a cross-board call-to-action, a reaction label, and a bulk-unfollow refresh issue.
• Fixed the image picker in My Stuff replies and a stale-reply refresh issue.
• Added inline validation to block duplicate configuration examples.
• Completed the Occasions-to-Events and TKB-to-Knowledge Base terminology rename.
• Persisted custom survey question and answer wording through text-override settings.
• Made survey submission atomic and per-user on the server side.
• Improved cache reliability under heavy load, reducing intermittent errors.
• Improved spam processing reliability by preventing a retry backlog buildup.
• Fixed an Aurora SDK dependency conflict blocking clean installs.

 

Pre-Prod Rollout: August 3-4. Testing window open from August 4 through August 16.

Production Rollout: August 18-19.