The 18.6 Release includes new Admin settings related to GDPR and database-related performance improvements.
New admin settings to enable a cookie-usage notification banner
As part of the new data privacy regulation in the European Union (EU), websites are required to provide an explicit user consent for the usage of tracking cookies (“LithiumVisitor”). Companies must also provide access to a description of the information collected/stored in those cookies.
To enable the cookie banner for your community:
- Sign in to your community as an Admin.
- Go to System > Auto Signin/Cookies.
- Select the Turn on cookie policy notification banner option and enter the URL for your cookie/privacy policy.
Note: If you leave the URL field blank, the Learn more link in the banner will go to Lithium’s public Cookie Datasheet page. - Click Save.
When the cookie banner notification is enabled, every page on your community site displays the “this website uses cookies” banner:
The banner is displayed on your community site for each visitor until that visitor clicks the OK button. Clicking the Learn more link opens the webpage that describes your cookie policy, but does not dismiss the banner.
About the use of the cookie banner and its impact on visitor metrics
As required by the ePrivacy Directive in EU, this banner also blocks dropping of tracking cookies till there is an affirmative action from the user. This can be accomplished by closing the banner or continuing to browse the site.
Note that blocking tracking cookies until there is an affirmation from the user will have an impact on “Visits” and “Unique Visitors” metrics accuracy. Each new request of such users is considered a new, billable visit. Customers on billing visits will be affected. Learn more about Lithium cookies in our Lithium Cookies Data Sheet.
Database performance enhancements
Lithium’s database pooling technology has traditionally maintained two connection pools (and potentially double the number of connections) within each instance. In the 10 years since this technology was developed, new standards for querying databases have been written and more modern, fault-tolerant, and higher-performing pooling libraries have been developed.
The 18.6 Release includes several database performance enhancements that take advantage of these new standards. As a result of this work, you should see significant improvements including:
- A modern database layer with a pooling technology better suited to AWS.This is a highly-performant, connection pool with better management of failover scenarios and an RDS instance disappearing and then subsequently reappearing.
- Better management of database resources within LIA.
- Overall reduction in memory usage.
- More performant database layer that reduces overall per-request, connection usage.
API changes
LiQL updates
We now support MATCHES with the title and description fields on the Boards and Categories collections. This change has been backported to 18.6.
Examples:
SELECT id FROM boards WHERE title MATCHES 'Developer'
SELECT id FROM boards WHERE description MATCHES 'REST APIs'
SELECT id FROM categories WHERE title MATCHES 'Support Center'
SELECT id FROM categories where description matches 'Find solutions and support for Lithium products here'
You Found It. We Fixed It.
- We have fixed the issue where referrer traffic was being underreported in LSI metrics.
- We have fixed the issue where one or more nodes of a community cluster experienced missing quilts after a rolling restart.
- Previously, if you set the Community Name and Brand Name for the Value Analytics survey to be different at the Category level than from the Community level, the category-level survey still showed the default, community name. This display issue have been fixed.
- We have fixed the issue where adding “//” (relative path) to the end of a community URL on SSO-enabled communities resulted in all hyperlinks on that page being redirected to external sites.
- We have fixed the issue where reply by email responses were not working when using certain versions of Microsoft Outlook. Now, replying to posts via Outlook email work as expected.
- Previously, when the Group Statistic widget was added to the Group Page, the page threw an error and wouldn’t load. This issue is now fixed, and the page loads without error.
- We have fixed the issue where the notification feed indicated that only 2 users kudoed a post, even when more that 2 users had kudoed the post. Now, the kudos notification displays the correct number of user kudos.
- We have fixed the issue where partially registered and SSO users were able to make quick reply posts without a username (instead of being redirected to the Finish Registration page). This issue is now fixed.
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