The 16.3 Release includes improvements to several core features, including Idea Exchanges, Search, Kudos, TKB, and Move Message, as well as an exciting update on the Lithium Responsive platform.

New Features

• Update on Lithium Responsive
• Improvements to Idea Exchanges
• Out-of-the-box, default idea statuses
• Feature-specific statuses in the Idea Statuses component
• Search improvements
• Updates to private message search
• New faceted search results in sorting options
• Move TKB draft article
• Update subscription options when moving posts
• Ability for users to revoke kudos
• Description field added to roles
• Spam and Marked Not Spam columns added to LSI reports
• Deprecating JSONP support

Update on Lithium Responsive

Customers engage with your Lithium Community throughout the day whether they are on the go or relaxing at home. They can start a conversation on their laptop and continue it on their mobile device. Our goal is to adapt your customers’ Community experience seamlessly across devices so that they can connect when they want, wherever they are. Lithium Responsive optimizes your community for a wide range of devices from mobile phones to tablets to desktop monitors. Using Lithium Responsive, you can provide a consistent brand and user experience everywhere, ensuring a feature-rich community on all devices. Learn about the five benefits of going responsive here, including better search engine optimization (SEO), increased engagement and a consistent experience.

Last year, we announced the Lithium Responsive platform, a solution for delivering a single, unified community experience to your users across their mobile and desktop devices.

However, until now, Lithium Responsive has only been available via an engagement with our Professional Services group. We're happy to share that we're now preparing to make Responsive available to customers who want to lead their own responsive redesigns with their own development teams. Starting next month, Lithium Responsive for Developers will enter Open Beta. To help you understand more about Lithium Responsive and how to plan your project, we'd like to share some draft documentation with you now. This documentation will be updated regularly throughout our beta period.

We will also feature Responsive for Developers in the Developer Showcase at LiNC’16 this year. To view the outcome of the beta program and meet with other developers who implemented Responsive in their communities, contact your Customer Success Manager or register here.

 

Learn more about Lithium Responsive:

• About Lithium Responsive
• Things to know before you begin
• Skin architecture
  
• Feature versions and responsive

Improvements to Idea Exchanges

We have made several improvements to Idea Exchanges, including:

• Out-of-the-box, default status values
• Ability to select which statuses to feature on your idea board pages

Note: In addition to these improvements, we have also made several other enhancements to the overall design and functionality of Idea Exchanges when using Responsive, currently in Closed Beta.

 

Note: 5-star ratings are not supported for Ideas with Lithium Responsive at this time. 5-star ratings will be supported in 16.11.

Out-of-the-box, default idea statuses

We’ve improved our out-of-the-box status options for new Idea Exchanges. Previously, when you created a new Idea board, you had a blank slate on which you could create the status values you wanted for the specific board. We’ve now added several default statuses that are created when you add a new idea board. (You can still edit or delete these default statuses, as well as add new ones specific to your needs.)

Note: These default statuses are created only for new idea boards. Any existing idea boards will not have their defined statuses altered.

Each new Idea board includes these status options:

• New: Newly submitted idea awaiting team review
• Needs Info: More information is needed from the author of this idea
• Investigating: Idea is being investigated and scoped by the team
• Accepted: Idea has been accepted by the team
• Declined: Idea has been rejected by the team
• Delivered: Idea has been completed and delivered to customers

 

To rearrange, edit, or delete any of these statuses:

1. Sign in to Community Admin.
2. Click Choose and navigate to the idea board you want to work on.
3. Go to System > Statuses.
4. Click the Statuses tab.
   
   
5. Move Up, Move Down, Edit, or Delete individual statuses, as needed.
6. Click Save.

Feature specific statuses in the Idea Statuses component

Previously, all idea board status values were “featured” in the Idea Statuses component, shown here:

Now, you have the ability to choose which specific status values you want to feature in the Idea Statuses component. For example, I might want to hide the “Needs Info” and “Investigating” statuses:

 

To choose whether to feature a status in the Idea Statuses component:

1. Sign in to Community Admin.
2. Click Choose and navigate to the idea board you want to work on.
3. Go to System > Statuses.
4. Click the Statuses tab.
5. Click Edit next to the status you want to change.
6. Select or clear the Featured option.
   
   
7. Click Save.

Note: By default, all status value options have the Featured option selected. You must choose to clear this entry to hide the status value in the Idea Statuses component.

Search improvements

Updates to private message search

When performing a search of your private messages, the search results now include an inbox indicator so you can quickly identify which messages you’ve received.

New faceted search results sorting options

We have improved the display of search results when sorting by Type of Post (discussion style), Date, and Content (images, videos, attachments) in the search results page. Now, these search results indicate the number of results that meet each search filter.

Note: Faceted search is disabled by default. To enable it, contact Lithium Support.

 

To filter your search by these options and see faceted search results:

1. Sign in the the community.
2. Enter a term or phrase in the search field and click Search.
3. On the search results page, filter by Type of Post, Date, or Contents. For example:
   
   
   

Each filter now indicates how many results match each option for that filter.

The Search results list updates based on your selections.

Move a draft TKB article to another TKB

Sometimes, you start writing a draft of a TKB article and later realize that it should be published in a different knowledge base. Previously, you’d have to either publish the article and then move it to the correct knowledge base or delete the draft and start over. We’ve now added the ability for you to move draft TKB articles to a different knowledge base before you publish it.

Note: To move draft TKB articles, the user must have the Create, edit, publish, and manage articles permission. Go to Community Admin > Users > Permissions and scroll down to the Knowledge Base Articles section to grant this permission.

 

To move a draft TKB article to a different knowledge base:

1. Sign in to the community as a user with permission to move a draft TKB article.
2. Go to the dashboard for the TKB that has the article you want to move.
   
3. Click the article in the list you want to move.
   
   
4. Click Move Article.
   
   
5. Choose the knowledge base where you want to move the draft TKB article.
   
   
6. Click Move Post.

 

Your draft article now appears in the Drafts section of the dashboard for that knowledge base.

Update subscription options when moving posts

Sometimes, you need to move posts from one thread to another. Previously, when users were subscribed to the parent thread, their subscriptions were lost when you moved a post to a new location.

For example, let’s say a user is subscribed to blog article and made a comment in that blog. Then, this comment was moved to another thread. In this scenario, the subscription to the original article was lost. To address this issue, we have now enabled the person moving the message to determine exactly what should happen with the user’s subscriptions.

Now, when moving posts, you choose one of these subscription move options:

• Keep user subscribed to the original thread (default)
• Move user’s subscription to the new thread
• Subscribe user to both the original and the new thread
• Unsubscribe user from both the original and the new thread

Note: This feature is disabled by default. If you want to turn on this feature/workflow for your community, contact Lithium Support.

To update thread subscription options when moving posts:

1. Sign in to the community and go to the post you want to move.
2. Open the Options menu and click Move Message.
   
   
3. Open the Subscriptions menu and choose an option:
   
   
4. Complete the rest of the form, including choosing the destination for the post.
5. Click Move Post.

Ability for users to revoke kudos inline

We have made a global enhancement that makes revoking kudos easier. Now, users can revoke any kudo, if they change their mind or click Kudo by accident, simply by clicking the Kudo button again. The user no longer needs to go to the Options menu and click Revoke Kudo.

There is nothing you need to do to enable this behavior; this enhancement works in all places where you have kudos enabled on your site.

 

Description field added to roles

When creating roles, it is useful to be able to add a description of the special privileges or purpose. For example, if you are creating a community-level role that has special permissions only on certain boards, you might want to record those details.

 

To add a description to a role:

1. Sign in to Community Admin.
2. Go to Users > Permissions > Roles.
3. Find a role in the list and click the Edit Description icon.
   
   Or, click Create New Role to create a new role.
4. Describe the role in the Role Description field.
   
5. Click Save.

 

The description displays next to the role in the Role list.

Spam and Marked Not Spam columns added to LSI reports

We have added two columns to the LSI content reports (Category, Board, Conversation, Member) to report on spam-related activities. The new spam-related metrics are:

• Spam: The number of messages marked as spam by either the Spam Quarantine filter or by an Admin user during the date range of the report.
• Marked Not Spam: The number of messages marked as not being spam by the Admin user during the date range of the report. These counts are grouped by the date the message was marked as not spam, not by the original post date of message.

 

To view spam-related metrics in your LSI reports:

1. Sign in to the community.
2. Click Lithium Social Intelligence in the Community Dashboard.
3. Click the CONTENT tab.
4. Click All Categories. This report sorts data based on your community structure.
5. In the table at the bottom of the page, click a community category to drill down for more detail.
6. (Optional) Click a time period in the metric header.
7. If the Spam and Marked Not Spam columns are not showing, open the gear menu and click Manage Columns.
   
   
8. Check the Spam and Marked Not Spam options, as needed, and click Save.
   
   

The Community Structure table displays the Spam and Marked Not Spam for your currently-selected node.

To track specific moderator actions related to marking items as spam:

1. Sign in to the community.
2. Click Lithium Social Intelligence in the Community Dashboard.
3. Click the MODERATORS tab.

In the Moderator Activity table, you can see the spam-related actions each moderator has taken:

Deprecating JSONP support

In 3 months, with the 16.6 LIA release, we will be removing ability to use JSONP for cross site requests. If you are using JSONP to access APIs across domains, you need to migrate your customization to use Cross-Origin-Resource-Sharing (CORS) to ensure it continues to work after 16.6. Click here for more information on how to set up CORS by filing a support ticket.

You Found It. We Fixed It.

• We have fixed the display issue where @Mentions results were not being listed in alphabetical order.
• Previously, when you attempted to use the REST API to @mention a user who had a special character in their username (for example, john_dowden) and there was another user who had an abbreviated version of that username (for example, john), the user with the abbreviated username was mentioned, not the person with the full username. We have fixed this issue, and you can now use the REST API to @mention people who have special characters in their username. Supported special characters include: colon (:), period (.), plus sign (+), underscore (_), and hyphen (-).
• We have fixed the typo in the tooltip for the Community Admin > System > File Attachments > Max attachment file size (bytes) to display the correct file size value.
• We have fixed the issue where forums and blogs were not being sorted properly after a migration.
• We have fixed the display issue where invalid characters were being displayed in the User photos component on the user’s profile page when using Media Experience. Now, the punctuation displays correctly.
• We have fixed the display issue where large videos did not display within the boards of the post.
• We have fixed the issue where you received an unexpected error when you attempted to create a blog with the same ID used by another board. Now, you receive a more friendly message.