Connect your Khoros Community to Iris AI
Applies to: Iris AI with Khoros Communities (Classic or Aurora). Last reviewed: November 2026.
Connecting your Khoros Community brings its posts and replies into the Iris AI inbox, where your team can prioritize, analyse, reply to and moderate them. You set it up once, in a five-step wizard, and it takes about ten minutes when you have the details below ready.
Before you start
You need:
- Admin access to Iris AI (Account Admin, or Source Integration Admin).
- Your community's address, for example
https://community.yourbrand.com. Use the root address only, without any path. - Your Community ID. On Aurora communities this is the community's short name; on Classic communities it is shown in Community Admin. If you are not sure, enter your best value: Iris AI checks it and corrects it when you test the connection.
- A service user on your community. We recommend a dedicated account (for example IrisIntegration) rather than a person's own login:
- It must have the Administrator role, or a moderator role with API access, on your community.
- It must sign in with a community username and password. If your community uses single sign-on, create this account as a local (non-SSO) user.
- To reply and moderate from Iris AI, it needs permission to make REST API calls with modify access. Administrators have this by default.
- The boards you want to monitor (optional). You can monitor the whole community or choose specific boards by their IDs, which you can see in each board's URL.
API access protection. Many Khoros Communities now protect their APIs from automated traffic. Your Customer Success Manager confirms that your community accepts requests from Iris AI before you connect. If the connection test reports a blocked request, contact them.
Step 1: Start the wizard
- In Iris AI, open Admin and select Social Connections under Integrations (Care tab).
- Select Deploy New Connection.
- Select Khoros Community.
Choose a platform: Khoros Community
You can also start from Admin > Source Integrations with the community icon in the Add bar.
Step 2: Accept the deployment agreement
Read the agreement (scroll to the end), tick the box and select I Agree & Continue. It confirms that your organization owns or is authorized to use the community credentials, and covers lawful use of the collected data.
Deployment agreement
Step 3: Enter your community credentials
| Field | What to enter |
|---|---|
| Community API URL (required) | The root address of your community, for example https://community.yourbrand.com. |
| Community ID (required) | Your community's ID. Iris AI corrects it automatically when the test succeeds. |
| Service User and Service Password (required) | The service user described above. |
| Basic Auth User and Basic Auth Password | Leave empty, unless your community sits behind an extra browser password prompt (common on staging or sandbox communities). |
| Moderation Persona User ID | Optional. The numeric ID of a community user that moderation actions post as when an agent has not connected their own Community user. Leave empty to use the service user. |
Select Test Connection. When it shows Valid with your community's name, select Continue to Monitoring. You cannot continue until the test passes.
Credentials step with a successful test
All credentials are stored encrypted. You can update them later from the connection's details page, for example after the service user's password changes.
If the test fails: "login rejected (401)" means the username or password is wrong, or the user signs in through SSO. A blocked or 403 response usually means API access protection; contact your Customer Success Manager.
Step 4: Choose what to monitor
All fields are optional. If you leave them empty, Iris AI monitors every board the service user can see.
| Field | What it does |
|---|---|
| Boards | Comma-separated board IDs to monitor, for example product-support, how-to. |
| Categories | Comma-separated category IDs, to narrow monitoring to boards in those categories. |
| Labels | Comma-separated post labels to flag when posts arrive. |
| Include hidden boards | Off by default. Turn it on only if you want content from hidden boards. |
| Exclude boards | Board IDs to skip even if they match the rules above, for example archive or internal boards. |
| Polling Interval (seconds) | How often Iris AI checks for new and edited posts. From 30 to 300 seconds; 60 by default. |
Monitoring rules
Tip: start with the boards your team actively moderates, check the results for a few days, then widen. Select Continue to Components.
Step 5: Choose features
- Polling is always on. It collects posts, replies, kudos and edits on schedule.
- Publishing lets your agents reply to posts and use moderation actions from Iris AI. Select it if your team will respond from Iris AI.
Features
Step 6: Review and deploy
Check the summary. You can give the connection a name (for example Customer Community). Select Deploy. Iris AI provisions and starts the connection; this takes a minute or two. There is no infrastructure to run on your side.
Review and deploy
Step 7: Check that it works
- On Social Connections, the new Khoros Community card shows ACTIVE and Components Active 2 / 2 (with Publishing).
- Post a test topic on a monitored board. After the polling interval, it appears in Agent as a new case with the community icon, the board name and the post's tags.
- The Messages Collected count on the card goes up.
The Khoros Community connection card
View Details shows each component's status and lets you update the community credentials or delete the connection.
Connection details and actions
Next steps
- Ask each agent to connect their own Community user, so replies appear under their community name: Replying to and moderating Khoros Community posts in Iris AI.
- Set up tags, work queues and priority rules for community posts, for example a queue per product area and a higher priority for posts that mention an outage: Routing work in Iris AI: tags, work queues, priority and smart views.
- Turn on the AI features you want, such as summaries, relevance scoring and draft replies: AI features in Iris AI.
Planning a change to your community, such as an upgrade, a new address or single sign-on? Tell your Customer Success Manager first, so the connection is updated at the right time.