Release Notes & Updates

12 MIN READ

Khoros Communities 26.6 Release Notes

Khoros Staff

3 hours ago

26.6 introduces Contests, a new way to spark participation, peer collaboration and recognition in your community, and delivers our largest accessibility release to date, a major step in our WCAG 2.2 AA work. It also builds on Orchestrator Scheduled Rules with more precise audiences, and brings improvements to federated search, carousels and the social feed. Email delivery gets a round of fixes, and other fixes address scheduled publishing, moderation actions, mention and follower emails, and private image access.

Try everything shipped so far on Staging

The Aurora features released from 26.2 through 26.5, which were introduced as Early Access, are now available on client Staging environments so you can explore and test them with your own content and configuration.

Features available to try on Staging

AI Moderation and Appeals, Community Language Model / Answer Assist, Community Orchestrator
Customizable Email Templates with Orchestrator integration, Proactive Clarification Questions, Polls, Metric Explorer and Search Analytics, Expert Report, multi-select search filters and Author Search, Zoom event registration
Cross-Board Posting, Interactive Social Feed (reactions, save and follow), Admin Review Mode for Answer Assist, Answer Requests opt-out, reaction email notifications
Federated Search, Carousels (featured content banners), Orchestrator Scheduled Rules and Run Logs

Please note that

Production is not changed. Nothing is enabled in production without your testing and an explicit request.
To enable a feature in production, tell your Customer Success Manager which features you have tested and want live

New Features (Aurora)

Contests: recognize and reward your members

Contests give your members a fun, structured way to take part, collaborate with their peers and be recognized. Invite members to share their best work, work together in teams, vote for each other and earn rewards such as prizes, badges and ranks. Admins set everything up from a guided wizard, with no developer involvement.

Rewards that recognize. For each contest, define reward tiers (for example first place, runners-up and a special mention). Each tier has a name, a description, an optional image and an optional badge, and you decide how many winners each tier has. Rewards are shown clearly on the contest page so members know what they are working toward. Badges are awarded automatically when results are announced.

Three types of contest to fit your goals:

Submission contest: members submit an entry (a photo, an idea, a story, a how-to) and winners are chosen by community vote or by judges. Best for user-generated content and ideas.
Activity Challenge: no entries needed. Members qualify for reward tiers through what they do in your community during a set time window: posts, replies, kudos. Best for lifting everyday participation and welcoming new members.
Hackathon: teams build and submit a project, and a judging panel scores it against a rubric. Best for product ideas, builds and showcases.

Voting or judges. Choose how winners are decided:

Community voting: members vote on entries, a live leaderboard shows how the contest is going, and winners are ranked by votes with clear tie-break rules.
Judges: appoint judges who score entries from 0 to 10 in half-point steps. Winners are ranked by judge score.

Contest boards. Submission contests and Hackathons collect entries, so they run on a Contest board, a new board style. Create a board with the Contest style under Community structure and choose it as the contest's venue. Entries are posted to the board as part of the contest, and members don't start regular posts there. Activity Challenges can be attached to any board type, so they can count posts and replies on your existing boards.

Run it your way.

Team entries with open or restricted enrollment, and a discussion thread on each contest.
Contest widgets for the home page and boards (active contests, my contests, progress, leaderboard) and dedicated contest pages.
Contest emails and notifications for entries, results and winners.
Admin dashboards for participation, entries and results, with winner review and correction.

Availability: Contests are an Early Access feature, behind a feature flag, and are off by default. Contact your Customer Success Manager to begin; once enabled, contests are fully configurable from the admin panel. While contests are off, members see no contest content in navigation, search, board lists or email-template lists.

Coming next: My contests on the member profile, a judging queue for large contests, contest cards in the feed, and micro-games: quick, lightweight games (such as trivia, this-or-that, predictions and word guess) for everyday engagement. [confirm roadmap wording]

Accessibility (WCAG 2.2 AA)

26.6 is our largest accessibility release so far, with fixes across keyboard use, screen readers, focus, labels and visual design in the member experience. Our WCAG 2.2 AA work continues in upcoming releases.

Keyboard and focus

Visible focus indicators restored across Aurora, including in Windows High Contrast (forced-colors) mode.
Focus returns to the trigger when dialogs close, Tab stays inside open dialogs, and every dialog has a proper initial-focus target.
The rich-text editor toolbar is reachable by Tab; Escape in editor popups no longer closes the whole modal.
Fixed the hover-card keyboard trap; hover cards no longer open on focus alone and Escape closes only the card.
Pickers and All Filters move focus in when opened and back when closed; focus moves to the first revealed reply.
Preview images, badges and tooltips are keyboard-operable.

Names, labels and structure

One main landmark per page, named navigation landmarks, and headings on pages that lacked one.
Accessible names include the visible label (inbox folders, timestamps, logo link, account menu, sort controls).
Dialog titles are real headings; radio groups, tag groups and table captions are exposed correctly.
Tag links announce each tag once, with post counts; decorative icons are hidden from screen readers.
Autocomplete tokens corrected on form fields.

Status messages (WCAG 4.1.3) When something changes on the page without moving focus, screen readers now announce it, so people who can't see the screen aren't left guessing. For example:

how many results a search or filter found, or that it found none, and when a search fails;
how many suggestions are in a picker;
the unread reply count on a feed post, a post's moderation status, and reply and view counts.

Visual

24px minimum target size for kudos and vote counts.
Contrast fixes for badges, closed polls, rank badges and radio focus rings.
No horizontal overflow at 320px; date picker and cover image text-spacing fixed.
Missing translations filled in across 15 text bundles, so non-English interfaces no longer show English fragments.

Enhancements (Aurora)

Email

New members now receive their registration email in the language they were viewing the community in; the viewed language is saved as their profile language before the email is sent.
{subject} resolves to the post title in workflow emails.
Community URL globals and the unsubscribe link now work in scheduled-rule and digest emails.
The optional message in invitation emails is shown as plain text.
Insert Link in the email editor no longer adds http:// in front of rule variables.
Email templates that cannot work yet are hidden from the template list.

Orchestrator: Scheduled Rules enhancements

Scheduled Rules, introduced in 26.5, let community managers run automations daily, weekly or monthly to reach the right members for re-engagement, win-back and recognition campaigns. 26.6 makes them more precise and more dependable:

New "Last Visit (days ago)" audience condition: enter a number of days (for example 30) to reach members who last visited more than, or less than, that many days ago. The number is counted from the moment each run starts, so a weekly rule always targets a moving window instead of a fixed calendar date. The existing "Last Visit" date condition remains for fixed dates.
Audiences no longer come up empty: on communities where empty searches are turned off, a scheduled rule could find zero members for every audience condition and still report a successful run. Audiences now resolve to the members who match.
Safer editing: editing a scheduled rule can no longer silently widen its audience.
Clearer audiences and dates: audience notes and dates are shown in community time, and the schedule frequency control no longer overlaps Save and Cancel.
Rules triggered by features that aren't enabled in your community are no longer offered.

Federated Search

For members

The source filter a member chooses is now remembered. Previously it was cleared when the page loaded.
The first search on a community with federated sources shows a loading state instead of a blank results area.
Clicking an external result now gives immediate feedback while its content loads, instead of looking like nothing happened.
YouTube and Vimeo results play in the in-community reader.
External results are shown only to members who have accepted cookies, and this is now verified on the server from the member's own consent.

For admins

Role restrictions can now be created and updated on a source. Previously saving one failed with an error.
Unsaved edits are no longer lost when two admins change the same source; you can choose to keep your own edits.
Rotating a source credential no longer discards the new key.
Failed connection checks are now shown instead of hidden, and saving a board reorder can no longer overlap with another save.

Carousels

New media alignment control for the Split Media variant, and a "Default" gradient swatch with a working custom gradient editor.
Slide Count shows the true count and "+" no longer adds two slides on the first click.
A single-slide carousel now renders as a static banner; empty slides no longer publish placeholder text.
Auto-advance behaves correctly with one slide; Designer carousel keyboard navigation restored.
The carousel warning banner meets AA contrast for any theme.

AI Settings and Clarification Questions

The Clarification settings page can no longer lock you out when the kill switch is off: the re-enable toggle now always appears, and the kill switch defaults to off.
AI Settings no longer shows errors on first load, flickering, or raw text keys flashing.

Other Enhancements

Language rendering was fixed and the language toggle improved.
The community guidelines link is now an admin setting.
Timezone labels show standard and daylight GMT offsets.

Bug Fixes

Posts, replies and the social feed

Social feed cards: counts no longer split mid-number in the card footer, reactions no longer overlap the reply count, and cards now show 4, 3 or 2 columns depending on screen width.
Show More on long posts: a long post that is cut off with "Show More" can now be collapsed again with "Show Less" (previously it could only expand). If loading the full post fails, the post stays collapsed with a message and you can retry. Long AI replies are no longer cut through the middle of their citations.
Comments turned off: the "Comments/Replies have been turned off for this post" banner used to show to everyone, including admins who could still reply. Each person now sees only what applies to them, so members see the reply button, or why they can't reply.
@mention emails: a member mentioned in a draft blog or knowledge base article used to be emailed when the draft was saved and again when it was published. They are now emailed once, when it is published.
Notify Followers on edits: edits to published blog and knowledge base articles notify all followers only when the author ticks "Notify Followers". Other edits follow each member's own subscription settings.
Polls on profiles: the Polls tab on a member's profile now lists only their polls; it previously listed all of their topics.
Accept as Solution is no longer offered on rejected or in-review replies.
A post whose image was rejected or purged can be edited again; previously every save failed.
Editing a scheduled knowledge base article without touching its schedule (for example adding a tag) no longer cancels the scheduled publication.
Code samples keep their line breaks when a post is reopened from an autosave, and an Name typed inside a code sample stays as text instead of becoming a mention.
Images found through Unsplash search in the cover image picker can be added to a post.
Signed-out visitors no longer hit an error on pages with featured sections when anonymous access is off.

Moderation and administration

Moderation actions: Mark as Spam, Mark as Not Spam and Ban Member sometimes did nothing because their confirmation dialogs disappeared. They now work, and actions that aren't available are shown greyed out with the reason instead of being hidden.
Unarchiving a topic that was archived while unmoderated no longer fails.
Page Designer: Page Templates no longer crashes the whole page when a template's page is missing, and the sidebar no longer steals focus from the canvas.
Moderation audit-trail reads are bounded so very large communities do not run out of memory.
Admin List Users no longer crashes on a negative role count.
Report actions require a verified email.

Pages, sorting and time

A board sort choice is now kept for the member across servers; previously it could revert to the default.
A board or post under a category the member can't read now redirects to the community home instead of showing an error page.
Timezone dropdowns show both standard and daylight GMT offsets, and wrong all-year offsets are corrected.

Images and files

Private and legacy-group images now display correctly for group members, signed-out readers and API sessions.
Images whose parent content has been deleted now return "not found" instead of an error.
Responsive image sizes are served for private albums when responsive images are enabled.

Reliability and security

The Aurora app now recovers from Cloudflare challenges automatically.
Hardened image handling, file downloads and shared caching, credential logging, and sign-in token handling.
Upgraded Aurora's web framework to address reported vulnerabilities.
Requests with a missing body, non-owner image requests and similar cases now return the correct response (400, 403, 404) instead of a server error.

Classic

Enhancements and fixes in this release that apply to Classic communities, including those shared with Aurora.

Email

New members now receive their registration email in the language they were viewing the community in; the viewed language is saved as their profile language before the email is sent.
{subject} resolves to the post title in workflow emails.
Community URL globals and the unsubscribe link now work in scheduled-rule and digest emails.
The optional message in invitation emails is shown as plain text.
A member mentioned in a draft blog or knowledge base article is now emailed once, when it is published, instead of when the draft is saved and again on publication.
Edits to published blog and knowledge base articles notify all followers only when the author ticks "Notify Followers". Other edits follow each member's own subscription settings.

Scheduled Rules

Editing a scheduled rule can no longer silently widen its audience.
Rules triggered by features that aren't enabled in your community are no longer offered.

Single sign-on

Signing out of a community that uses single sign-on with Frontend Logout now reliably ends the identity provider session too, so the next person on a shared device is not silently signed back in as the previous user.
Turning on Feature Logging no longer breaks OIDC sign-in: a failed sign-in shows the normal error page, and the diagnostic log is complete and readable.
Sign-on secrets and tokens are no longer written to logs, at any log verbosity level.

Posts, articles and images

Community-hosted videos are no longer removed from a post when it is edited and saved.
Images found through Unsplash search can be uploaded again; previously every upload failed.
A category or board picture can be set from a web address, and any remaining failure shows a clear message instead of a generic error.
The Edit option is available on a published knowledge base article while a scheduled update to it is pending.
Editing a scheduled knowledge base article without touching its schedule (for example adding a tag) no longer cancels the scheduled publication.
Older inline images in published articles that showed a broken-image placeholder, even though the image was intact, display again once the restore is enabled for your community.
Reviewers can see an author's embedded images while a blog post is awaiting review.
Inline images in open Group Hub forum posts display for signed-out visitors.
Responsive image sizes are served for private albums when responsive images are enabled.
Malformed tag page addresses return "not found" instead of a server error.

Moderation and administration

Unarchiving a topic that was archived while unmoderated no longer fails.
Moderation audit-trail reads are bounded so messages with very large histories do not run out of memory.
Admin List Users no longer crashes on a negative role count.
The page-level Options menu on a forum reply page now reads "Delete Topic", matching what the action does; it was previously labelled "Delete Reply".
Private message deletions are recorded correctly in community analytics instead of producing repeated processing errors.

Pages, sorting and time

A board sort choice is now kept for the member across servers; previously it could revert to the default.
Timezone dropdowns show both standard and daylight GMT offsets, and wrong all-year offsets are corrected.

Reliability and security

Hardened image handling, file downloads and shared caching: image processing fails closed when the image service is degraded, the image-metadata library was upgraded, Unsplash downloads reach only Unsplash's own servers, and shared caches no longer store private file downloads.
Requests with a missing body and non-owner image requests now return the correct response (400, 403) instead of a server error.