Glossary of common Community Aurora terms

Here's a list of common terms you'll encounter when using an Aurora community.

Note: Some of the glossary terms presented here might be for features or terms not yet available in the Aurora Community experience, but will be as we continue to build toward feature parity with Community Classic.

• Accepted Solution: A reply to a message that contains a solution or answer to a posted problem/question that has been marked as the solution by the person who posed the question.
• Administrator: Community administrators are responsible for configuring how community features behave, setting up member roles and permissions, and building out the overall community structure (board, forums, categories). Community Administrators do most of their work in Community Settings, Page Builder, and Theme Editor.
• Analytics: Place when you can view reports and dashboards to gain insight about site traffic, member engagement, and other valuable community metrics.
• Article: A post in a Knowledge Base; post is the generic term. Replies to articles are called comments.
• Attachment: A file (for example, an image, PDF, or ZIP file) that has been uploaded and associated with a post.
• Avatar: A graphical representation (visual icon) for a community member or place on the community.
• Badge: A badge is a type of visual reward that community members can earn for completing specific community actions or for achieving important community milestones. Badges are a great way to encourage members to use different community features and spend more time engaging with the community.
• Blog: Contains member-generated posts where entries are made in journal style and typically displayed in a reverse chronological order.
• Board: A collection of posts and comments/replies within a community content place.
• Category: The second level in a community's hierarchy; a subdivision of a community. Categories can also be nested within other categories.
• Comment: A member-added reply in response to an article (not intended to be a discussion).
• Content Types: The different content features (forum, blog, knowledge base, etc.) supported on an Aurora community (called Discussion Styles in Community Classic).
• Contest: Community feature that enables you to engage community members and stimulate interest in a community by hosting idea competitions to solicit feedback from community members. (Not yet available.)
• Community Developer: Community developers are responsible for building out the community site and customizing its look and feel to match the corporate branding guidelines, extending the platform to provide custom features, and publishing changes to the community stage and production sites. Community developers spend most of their time in the Designer area or using other Khoros and third-party tools to design and build their site.
• Content Editor: The main writing tool for community content (called the Message Editor in Community Classic).
• Discussion: A combination of topic posts and replies between community members in a forum.
• Event: A collection of community-hosted activities (seminars, meet-ups, conferences). You can notify community members of online or in-person events by publishing them in the Events calendar.
• Floated Message: A post that has been deemed of sufficient importance or commonality that a moderator or admin has pinned it to the top of the board. (Not yet available.)
• Follow: Ability for a member to be notified of new activity in topics, boards, categories, or members that they are interested in (called Subscribe in Community Classic).
• Forum: A place for members to ask questions or start discussions on a topic related to the content theme (a product or service, for example) for that forum.
• GraphQL: GraphQL is an open-source data query and manipulation language for APIs and a runtime for fulfilling queries with existing data. GraphQL is the main way to access Khoros Community APIs via the Aurora experience.
• Group: Groups deliver an enhanced experience for Community members to engage around a common theme or purpose. Each group has its own configurable set of content types (forum, blog, knowledge base) to organize content and communication. You must be a member of a group to participate in that group. Group memberships can be open, closed, or hidden.
• Ideas board: A content area that enables members to submit suggestions to the company that hosts the community.
• Knowledge Base: A collection of informative, brand-trusted articles about a particular topic. Knowledge Bases are made up of articles with comments.
• Leaderboard: A list of objects that highlights the top objects of a particular functionality; for example, a tagging leaderboard could be represented as a list of members ordered and highlighted by how many tags each member has used. (Not yet available.)
• Likes: Units of approval, like a thumbs-up, given to a post (called Kudos in Community Classic).
• Member: Community members are community users who have signed up and registered with the community. Community members can be assigned specific roles, earn ranks and badges, and build an online reputation in their community profile. Community members spend all their time on the community boards and forums.
• Mentions: When members are mentioned in posts, they are sent emails to let them know. A way to call out specific members in their posts and invite them to join the conversation. You can also mention content.
• Moderator: Community moderators interact with community members by publishing new articles and responding to posts and questions. Moderators also protect the integrity of the content being posted on the community by reviewing content for appropriateness and relevancy. Moderators spend most of their time on the community site or in Khoros moderator tools.
• Page Templates: Aurora tool used to design layouts for pages for your community site. Tool you use to view and publish site changes.
• Permission: A community setting that can be granted or denied to community members. Through permissions and roles, community admins can control exactly what each person can do or see on the community.
• Place: A designation of placement in the community. As such, you can have a community-level place, category (or container) places, or board-level places (forum, knowledge base, blog). 
• Post: A message, article, comment, reply submitted to a community; the generic term for all types of  content. Also, the act of submitting content to the community.
• Private Message: Messages members can send to other community members from their Inbox rather than posting them publicly; similar to email but only a community username is required.
• Profile: Published personal information about a member.
• Rank: An achieved level of performance (usually based on a combination of the quality and quantity of the member's engagement) recognized within the community.
• Ratings: A light-weight way for community members to vote on the relative value of content in the community. (Not yet available.)
• Reply: A comment made by a community member in a forum discussion.
• Role: An admin-defined set of permissions that enables users who have the role to to view or do certain things on the community.
• Single Sign On (SSO): Enables member authentication using the customer's directory as the master. Can be implemented either with cookies or without (using long URLs).
• Spam Quarantine: Khoros Community feature that enables customers to monitor/review the posts that get automatically categorized as spam by the system.
• Tag: A type of metadata involving the association of descriptors with objects. Tags can be freeform (created by any community member) or preset (pre-defined by the Community Administrator.) In Community Classic, preset tags were called labels.
• Theme editor: Area where you can design the look and feel of your community site (colors, fonts, etc.) to match your brand.
• Thread: A collection of related posts, such as a post and its replies.
• User: An unregistered community participant (as opposed to a fully registered member).
• Widget: A self-contained, customizable component (like a recent topics list or contributing members list) you can add to a community page.