Member Experience

Performance optimizations

In this release, members will notice the following performance improvements:

• GraphQL query optimization: We've improved the performance of GraphQL queries by optimizing how they are processed, resulting in faster load times and reduced overhead.
• Text key reusability: We've streamlined how text is managed across components, reducing duplication and improving consistency throughout the platform.
• Improved page stability: We've made changes to improve page stability and reduce layout shifts, ensuring a smoother and more visually stable experience.
• Faster load times: We've enhanced caching for commonly used data, making frequently accessed pages load faster.
• Better experience for guest users: We've optimized the experience for users who aren't signed in by ensuring only necessary data is loaded, improving performance and responsiveness.

Muting conversations in the Inbox

Community members can now mute conversations in their inboxes to avoid receiving notifications for them. This can be useful if there is an extensive conversation occurring and a member does not need to view every update but may still need to reference the conversation. 

In your Inbox, you can mute or unmute a conversation by opening the Options menu for the desired message.

To learn more about muting conversations, see About Inbox privacy.

Calendar Invitation Email on Event RSVP

Previously, members had to manually add the ICS file to their calendars.

With this release, when you RSVP an event with Attending or Interested, a calendar invitation is automatically added to the calendar associated with your registered email address. 

The following screenshot shows an event that is automatically added to the member’s calendar.

Learn more about adding events to your calendar.

Additional Embedly support

We've enhanced Embedly integration in the community to support additional content types. You can now embed and preview the content from following platforms directly within posts and comments:

• Typeform
• Vidyard
• Loom

For Vidyard and Loom videos, members can either 

• play the video directly within the community, after accepting cookies, or
• choose to view it on the provider’s native platform.

The following screenshot shows a banner that prompts members to accept cookies or continue to the external site.

Note: To enable previews for these types of content, make sure both External Link Previews and External Link Warnings are turned on under Settings > Content Features > Links.

Learn more about managing external link previews and warnings and adding rich text previews.

View history option

Previously, members could view edit history only for blog posts and knowledge base articles. With this release, this capability extends to all content types—including replies and comments. Members with the View edit history permission can now see changes made to any post, giving you greater control and transparency over content edits.

The following screenshot shows the History option available for an idea.

Learn more on how to view and compare different versions of published content.

Tags autosuggest

Previously, tag suggestions appeared only after you started typing in the tag field.

Now, when you select + Add Tags, a list of relevant tags—both preset and freeform—immediately appears, relevant to the board you're posting on.

Read more on tags.

Admin Experience

Community Experience Surveys

Admins can enable community experience surveys, which prompt members to provide feedback about their experience in the community. Survey responses and scores can be collected via an export.

Creating a survey requires several configuration steps, including:

• designing the branding: select naming, logos, and colors
• designing its behavior: select who to present the survey to, when, and how often
• selecting its questions: select which questions to present to your visitors
• turning it on for visitors: easily toggle your survey on when you’re ready to go live—and easily turn it off

To access survey configuration options, go to Settings > Content Features > Community Experience Survey. To view specific setup steps for customer experience surveys, refer to Create community experience surveys.

To export your survey result data, in Content Features > Community Experience Survey > Questions and Answers, select Export (refer to View community experience survey results).

Designer: removal of page-load time option

As of this release, the Optimize page-load time option previously available in More options on widgets is no longer available because enabling it had a negative impact on the CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) Web Vitals metric. If you still want to use this option, a developer can modify the quilt directly in the plugin. Widgets that were set to use this option prior to this release will also continue to respect that selection.

Designer: logo navigation menu

In previous releases, we introduced the ability to add navigation text links and side menu navigation links. With this release, you can now add a drop-down navigation menu from the logo in your community. This is a prime location for adding links to your main categories to make it easy for your members to navigate to the most important areas of your community.

Refer to Header and Footer configuration for steps on adding navigation links to your header.

Move and merge content across content types

Duplicate content and evolving conversations are common in the community. Sometimes, a discussion is better suited to a different content type.For example, a community Discussion might be valuable as a knowledge base article. Similarly, an active Discussion might align better with an existing Idea in development. To maintain continuity and preserve valuable conversations, it should be easy to move or merge content between content types without losing context.To support this, we've introduced the ability

• Move content from one content type to any other content type
• Merge a Discussion or Idea as a reply or comment to any other post

Following is a screenshot of the options you receive when you try to move content to any other content type.

By moving content from one content type to another, you have the flexibility to consolidate similar posts and reclassify content when its purpose changes - like turning a discussion into an idea. While moving content, prompts will inform you of any potential metadata loss during conversion.

By merging posts, you can bring similar content or conversions to one place in the community. Merged posts retain all replies, and prompts will inform you of any potential metadata loss during conversion.

Learn more about moving and merging content.

Automatic spam detection for images

Starting this release, all images along with the text content will be scanned for automatic spam detection.

Hyperlinking content in private messages

In Aurora Communities v25.03, we introduced the Turn on link hyperlinking permission. This allows members with the permission enabled to post URLs that automatically appear as clickable hyperlinks. For those with the permission set to Deny, URLs are displayed as plain text.

With this release, we’ve extended the same functionality to Private messages, ensuring consistent behavior across public and private interactions.

Learn more about Content permissions in About Content permissions.

External link warning settings

Previously, to generate previews for external URLs, you had to enable Rich text preview under Settings > Content Features > Rich Content.

With the upcoming support for Embedly, we've updated how this works. You’ll now find two separate settings under Settings > Content Features > Links:

• External link previews – Toggle on to generate rich previews for external URLs, allowing members to see linked content directly within the community.
  
  
• External link warning – Toggle on to show a confirmation message when members select a link that leads them outside the community.

These changes give you more control over how external content is handled and displayed.

Developer Experience

Previewing local changes on the SDK Staging site

In this latest update, we are excited to introduce a new feature that allows users to preview the SDK staging site from the perspective of various user roles. This functionality is designed to help developers and stakeholders understand how the changes will appear to multiple user types before going live.

• Non-admin/Anonymous
• Admin 
• Moderator
• Standard

See Previewing Local Changes as Different User in the Staging Site for more information.

Move Content across content types

As discussed in Move and Merge content across content types, we also provide GQL support to move content across different content types or discussion styles.

In Khoros Communities Aurora, members have already been able to move replies either to a new post or under an existing one. However, merging duplicate root posts — whether forums or ideas — was a missing piece.

With the release of the Merge Root Posts feature, community managers and moderators can now easily consolidate similar or duplicate topics into a single root post. This enhancement simplifies content organization, improves community navigation, and reduces redundant discussions.

See Merging Root Posts in Khoros Communities Aurora for more information.

Migrating from REST API to GraphQL

With Aurora, we are transitioning to a GraphQL framework for APIs. While REST APIs are still supported in Classic, we strongly recommend adopting GraphQL for all new components, endpoints, and integrations in Aurora.

Our long-term strategy is to phase out REST APIs in favor of GraphQL. Although we have not announced a sunset date yet, GraphQL is where we are focusing all new development and enhancements. We encourage all customers upgrading to Aurora to begin transitioning as early as possible. Early adoption will help ensure a smoother and more efficient migration experience in the future.

See Migrating from REST API to GraphQL for more information.

Custom Field Access Control

We've created a new guide detailing the ins and outs of controlling access to Custom Field data within your Community. This includes configuring custom fields for specific roles and node levels, including how to set up and scope custom field visibility.

See Configuring Custom Field Visibility for more information.

GraphQL Support for Page Scripts

You can now add GraphQL Queries and Fragments to Page Scripts and run them via the Page Script Handlebars Templates. This is a huge advantage for use cases such as personalized survey popup that enables you to dynamically render the name of the user as part of the popup to encourage engagement among members.

We've detailed this use case, including an example workflow in GraphQL Calls for Page Scripts.

Handlebar Templates for Salesforce Integration Notification Emails

In addition to the email notification fix in the 25.03 release, we added handlebar templates for the Salesforce integration notification email to let members know when the integration fails.

You Found It. We Fixed It.

Accessibility 

• Added "Filter by" to the ARIA label for the tags filter on the search results page to improve screen reader accessibility.
• Spotlight Search results are now read out by screen readers.
• All buttons on an event page are announced successfully by screenreaders.

Analytics

• The accuracy of visit-related metrics has been restored—communities no longer significantly underreport visits due to issues with different visitors sharing the same visitor ID.

APIs

• Group invitations no longer require grouphub:example formatting in the nodeId field when sent via a GraphQL mutation. The node ID now behaves as it does for any other node.
• Admins can now perform an SQL update and rollback of a site of the report ID column.
• Members can now migrate any content or content with widgets from Community Classic to Community Aurora using GraphQL API.
• Members can now delete a forum, blog, or KB post via GraphQL API calls.
• When you retrieve the full number of net likes and the member’s likes count via GraphQL, they are now consistent and match correctly as per the member’s action.

Badges

• The avatar_changed metrics for badge criteria now reflect “true” and “false” instead of a number of times.
• The badge requirement for the number of videos uploaded now increments as expected.

Counts

• Hovering your cursor over a specific note in the Admin notes now shows the absolute date and time of creation of that note.
• The Places widget shows the correct count for unread posts.

CWA

• The Schedule to publish button is visible when blog posts are turned off for comments.

Designer

• The image upload maximum size settings in Designer are no longer tied to the max upload settings set in admin, so admins now experience an error when uploading a banner in Designer only if they attempt to upload an image of 20 MB or larger.
• If the Hide category in place widgets, place picker menus, and search setting (under the Display settings of a category)is enabled for a category or board, it still appears in the list for assigning custom page templates.

Follow and notifications

• When you update the Advanced Settings in your Follow and Notification settings, they now save as expected.

Ideas

• Anonymous or non-authenticated users can no longer vote for ideas. 

Languages and localization

• You can now remove English as an available language for your community so that your community is available in the language of your choice.
• Chinese localization text files no longer break custom components.

Member profile

• The member profile page now shows the correct count for Likes received.
• All members, irrespective of their role, can now view their profile information.

Navigation

• Anonymous users are redirected to the login page when they try to access the URL of a draft.
• Selecting Submit for Review for blog posts or knowledge base articles, correctly redirects to the preview page.
• When you select the browser’s back button when you are on the Notification feed page, you are redirected to the previous page you visited and not stay on the same page.
• On the Header & Footer template, in the Edit Navigation panel, the Show bottom border and Show bottom shadow options now save correctly and appear appropriately in preview mode.
• Topic links on the All Topics page now redirects you to the correct page.

Private messages

• When an admin uses the Switch Member option and sends a private message, the message is now sent from the member they switched to instead of from the admin.
• Selecting an @mention in a private message redirects to the right content, place or member profile.
• All links added to private messages are now visible as links.

RTE

• Anchor tags added in source code are now visible as links.

Search and SEO

• Requests to community vanity URLs are now correctly redirected, resolving issues that may have impacted SEO traffic.
• URLs with .tsx extensions are no longer exposed to search engines, preventing 404 errors on Google search console and protecting SEO performance.
• The Show more links on search results page now load content correctly on mobile devices.
• Autosuggestions now work for search queries containing special characters in non-English languages.

Tags

• The tag list populates automatically when you attempt to add a tag to content that was moved to a board requiring tags.