About Aurora Analytics
To have a successful community, you need to know what’s working and what needs improvement. Aurora provides a robust set of analytics so you can get actionable insights to drive traffic and member engagement. You can determine what kinds of content needs improvement, what your members steer away from, and what they want more of from your community. These metrics help you learn where your members come from, what type of content they engage with, and where to focus on to reach new people. Having clear data enables you to plan towards community goals and make informed decisions to change course when things aren’t working. Aurora Analytics provides visual dashboards and interactive reports to provide you with high-level and detailed data on how your community is performing. Note: Currently, users can see the metrics up to the previous day in Aurora Analytics.. Data is reported in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Accessing Aurora Analytics To access Aurora Analytics, open your Account menu and click Analytics. Note: Members must have an Admin or Analytics role to access Aurora Analytics From the Analytics page, you can access Dashboard and Reports. The Dashboard provides you with an “at-a-glance” view of the activities that best indicate the overall health of your community and member engagement across your community. You can customize Dashboard settings to your requirements and get the most out of your data analysis. Reports present you with key metrics on content, boards, categories, and members in a tabular format. Related topics: Accessing Analytics Dashboard Dashboard Settings Aurora Analytics Metric Definitions Aurora Analytics Reports Refer to the Khoros Communities Analytics Essentials course for training on Communities Analytics.About Aurora Moderation
It is important for your community to be a positive space where members feel welcome, safe, and engaged. To foster this environment, moderators constantly monitor community activity by reviewing content for appropriateness, based on the guidelines you’ve put in place for your community. Using the Moderation tab in the Manage Content dashboard, moderators can quickly review and process large volumes of member-generated content. Depending on how you’ve set up your moderation process, content can be reviewed either before or after it is published to the community. From the Moderation tab, you can moderate forum discussion posts and their replies, ideas and their comments, as well as comments on blogs, knowledge bases, and events. Also, you can view the posts or private messages that are rejected as spam, abuse, or for other reasons and take further action on these posts or private messages. Moderation process You can set the moderation mode at the board level. Required: Moderators must moderate content to make it available in the community. (This was previously known as pre-moderation in Communities Classic.) Selective: The content is published, but moderators can moderate it after publication. (This was previously known as post-moderation in Communities Classic.) Auto-approved: Content does not require moderation and is approved automatically. Learn more about configuring moderation modes for various content types. When members post content on the community, the content is immediately routed to the Moderation, based on the moderation settings for that board. Note: When a board is set to Required moderation and members post content on this board, a confirmation message is displayed on the post indicating that post will be published as soon as it is approved from moderators: View Moderation tab Members with elevated permissions (Admins and Moderators) can access the Moderation tab in the Manage Content dashboard. Note that you must enable content moderation at the community level to view the Moderation tab. Members will see the Spam, Abuse, and Moderation tabs. The Moderation tab is where you can review content. By default, the Moderation tab is displayed with the list of unmoderated posts, where the Moderation status is set to unmoderated. The Moderation tab lists: Title: title of the post, reply, or comment Author: authors of the posts and replies Date: the date on which the post or reply is sent for moderation. Status: the publication status (Published or Unpublished) of the posts and replies. Number of views, likes, and comments for each post, reply, or comment. Note: You can sort this list based on the Date. From the Moderation tab, moderators can evaluate the posts and replies. approve or reject posts and replies message authors about their content. ban members When approved, posts are published in the community or remain in the community based on the moderation settings at board level. They are then removed from the Moderation tab. When rejected, the posts are removed from the community. The posts that are rejected as spam can also be viewed in the Spam tab. Learn more about approving or rejecting posts sent for moderation. To view the rejected posts or private messages, go to Filters and set Moderation Status as Rejected. From the Moderation tab, you can: Open any post to view the content Search and filter posts Approve or reject posts Message members on moderation actions about their posts Review the posts or private messages that have been rejected as Spam, Abuse, or other reasons Ban members Refer to the Khoros Communities Moderation Essentials course for training on this feature.About Aurora roles and permissions
Your community uses permissions to determine the actions that your community members can take and which community areas and features they can access. Instead of setting each of these permissions manually, permission settings are grouped into roles and then you can assign these roles to members. Khoros provides a set of default roles. You can modify these roles (although we don’t recommend it) and create your own roles. You can also create a relationship between your community ranks and roles so that members get new roles and receive additional permissions as they advance through the ranks. Each role has a setting for each permission. When you define a role, you can set some permissions directly and leave the default settings for the rest. After you define your roles, you can set up the ranks in your community to assign (and remove) roles when members change ranks. The higher the rank, the more access it’s likely to grant the member. In addition to controlling member access within a community, you can also use roles to gather metrics on community usage or to establish criteria for gaining a rank. Although it’s more common to use a rank to grant a role, you can also use a role to assign users a rank. Some communities use this technique, for example, to assign a special rank to community moderators by using a role as the criteria for granting a rank. Similarly, you may want to create a role specifically for your employees. They might have the same permission settings as other community members, but you can use a special employee role as the requirement for a corresponding rank to identify them as employees to the rest of the community. Note: Groups use the default community roles as well as a set of roles specific to groups. Learn more in Group roles and permissions. Related topics: Create a role Default Community roles Permission descriptions Add members to roles Best practices: roles and permissions You can also receive self-paced training on roles and permissions in our Build Khoros Communities course.About the Aurora Theme editor
The Theme editor in Aurora Designer enables you to customize the appearance of your community site to match the look and feel of your brand. With Theme, you can configure the page layout, set the size and style of your fonts, manage colors, manage icons, configure buttons and text links, manage avatars, and manage UI elements for your community site content (Blogs, Forums, Knowledge Bases, Ideas, Events, and Groups). After you have customized your community theme, click Publish to make them live on your site instantly. The Theme editor is separated into the following categories: Basics Fonts Colors Buttons and Text Links Avatars UI Elements Refer to the Build Khoros Communities course for training on site design.About Aurora Page Templates
Designer provides many page templates you can use and customize to fit the needs of your community. Many of these fall into similar categories and therefore have similar widgets and out-of-the-box designs. Some are a bit more complex and apply to the community globally. Below is an index and description of these categories and individual page templates. While there are many page templates and widgets to choose from, much of the functionality is repeated throughout Designer. For more information on this functionality, see the following articles: Using Page Templates Create and arrange sections in a Page Template Getting Started with Widgets Community Home template The Community Home page template applies only to the homepage of your community. On this template, you can add any widgets you want members to see on the very first page they land on in the community. Commonly added widgets are: Recent Content Places Top Contributors Top Content Header & Footer template The global Header & Footer template is unique in that it applies across your entire community. It contains the site header—composed of the navigation bar, the breadcrumb trail, and the banner—and the site footer. For more information, see Header & Footer Configuration. Container Dashboard templates Container dashboard templates define how higher-level place landing pages appear to members of the community. The following dashboard templates fall into this category: Category Dashboard Group Dashboard These templates enable you to provide a look into what’s available to members of that container to read, follow, and comment on. Commonly added widgets are: Recent Content Category Information or Group Information Members Top Contributors Top Content Content Type Dashboard templates Content type dashboard templates define how content type landing pages appear to members of the community. The following dashboard templates fall into this category: Forum Dashboard Blog Dashboard Knowledge Base Dashboard Ideas Dashboard Event Dashboard These templates enable you to provide a look at what’s going on in a board (forum, blog, knowledge base, events board, ideas board). Commonly added widgets are: Recent Discussions or Recent Content Forum Information, Blog Information, Knowledge Base Information, Event Board Information, or Ideas Board Information Top Content Top Contributors Content type-specific widgets are not available on a different content type’s dashboard template. For instance, you cannot add a Recent Discussions widget to a Knowledge Base Dashboard or an Ideas widget to a Blog Dashboard. Content post templates Content post templates define how a particular piece of content looks to members. The following templates fall into this category: Forum Discussion Blog Post Knowledge Base Article Idea Event These page templates come out of the box with widgets that cannot be deleted because they contain the body of a top-level discussion, post, article, or idea or because they contain a space for commenting on a discussion, post, article, or idea. However, you can add other widgets to these templates. Commonly added widgets are: Featured Content Related Content Recent Discussions Content type-specific widgets are not available on a different content type’s post template. For instance, you cannot add a Recent Discussions widget to a Knowledge Base Article template. Member Profile template The Member Profile page template applies only to the Member Profile, which is what members see when they click another member’s username in the community. On this template, you can add any widgets you want that give information about the member being highlighted. This template comes out of the box with a member information widget that cannot be deleted. This widget contains the member’s username, rank, email address, join date, number of contributions, and number of likes. You can add other widgets to this template. Commonly added widgets are: Contributions Top Contributions Groups Featured Content Search Results Page template The Search Results Page template applies only to the page that appears when someone runs a search in your community. This page template includes the following four widgets out of the box that cannot be deleted: Search bar widget (with filters) Content Results widget (shows content matching the search query) People widget (shows people whose usernames match the search query) Places widget (shows places with names matching the search query) Note: If the search term does not match with a particular widget type, that widget is not displayed in Designer or in the community. For example, if no places match your query, the Places widget is not visible in Designer or on the Search Results page in the community. Refer to the table below to understand the capabilities and limitations of each section or widget on this page template. Note: While you can add widgets to the bottom of the column containing the People widget and the Places widget, you cannot add a new widget between these two widgets. You can also add new sections to this page template. These can be moved and deleted, and you can add Text/HTML widgets to them. Related topics: About Community site structure About Categories About Groups About Blogs About Forums About Knowledge Bases About Ideas About Events About the Aurora member Profile page About Aurora Search Refer to the Build Khoros Communities course for training on site design.Aurora SEO: Regulate content crawling by search engines using robots.txt
When you publish content in the community, search engines (web robots or web crawlers) crawl these newly published pages to discover and gather information from them. After crawling the content, the search engines index these pages to provide relevant search results based on the search queries. It is important to instruct the web crawlers to crawl only the relevant pages and ignore the pages that don't require crawling activity. Using Robots Exclusion Protocol (a file called robots.txt), you can indicate the resources that need to be included or excluded from the crawling activity. When a new community is created, the Khoros platform configures the robots.txt file with the default rules for the community. The default rules include instructions, which are generic for all the communities. Admins and members with permissions can view the Default Rules in Robots.txt Editor (from Settings > System > SEO area). In the editor, you can also add Custom Rules that are appended after the default rules. Note: You cannot edit the default rules. How does Robots.txt work? You can find the robots.txt file in the root directory of your community by appending “robots.txt” at the end of the URL (https://site.com/robots.txt). The file includes the list of user agents (web robots), community URLs, and sitemaps with instructions indicating whether the user agents are allowed or disallowed to crawl the specified URLs. When the user-agents or web crawlers enter your website, they first read the robots.txt file and proceed further with the crawling activity based on the instructions added in the file. The user-agents gather information only from the community pages that are allowed and are blocked from the pages that are disallowed. Robots.txt syntax The robots.txt includes these keywords that are widely used to specify the instructions: User-agent: The name of the web crawler for which you are providing the instructions. Example: User-agent: testbot To provide instructions to all the user agents at a time, enter * (wildcard character). Example: User-agent: * Disallow: Command to indicate the user-agents not to crawl the specified URL. Note that the URL must begin with ‘/’ (forward slash character). Example: User-agent: testbot Disallow: /www.test1.com Allow: Command to indicate the user-agents that they can crawl the specified URL. Note that the URL must begin with ‘/’ (forward slash character). Example: User-agent: testbot Allow: /www.test2.com Sitemap: Indicates the location of any XML sitemaps associated with the URL. The Khoros platform automatically generates sitemaps for each community when it is created and adds them to the robots.txt file. Example: User-agent: testbot Sitemap: https://www.test.com/sitemap.xml The following is the sample format to allow or disallow a user-agent "testbot” to crawl the community pages: User-agent: testbot Disallow: /www.test.com Allow: /www.test1.com Sitemap: https://www.test.com/sitemap.xml Using the Robots.txt Editor The Robots.txt Editor enables you to add, edit, and remove custom rules to robots.txt. You can look for more information provided by Google and other crawlers handling rules in robots.txt. Let’s take an example where you want to add a custom rule to disallow a user-agent “testbot” from crawling a member profile page of the community. To add a custom rule: Sign in to the community as an Admin. Go to Settings > System > SEO. In the Robots.txt Editor, you can view the Default Rules and Custom Rules sections. In the Custom Rules section, click Edit. In the Edit window, enter the instructions and click Save. The rule appears in the Custom Rules area of the tab. You can edit or remove the existing Custom Rules by clicking the Edit option. The new custom rules get appended to the robots.txt file located in the root directory: After you edit the custom rules, you can validate the robots.txt via the Lighthouse tool. Learn more about robots.txt validation using lighthouse. Note: The Audit log records the member actions made in the robots.txt file.Aurora: Create and map a localized category
The Localized Communities feature enables you, as an admin, to create multiple “versions” of your community—each one in a different language. After you map your top-level categories to the languages you have enabled in your community, your customers are directed to the language category that best matches their browser settings. To enable Localized Communities in your community, you must first open a Support ticket. Create a localized category Important: We recommend that you set up your localized categories on a stage environment before setting them up on your production environment. Doing so enables you to reference the stage setup during the production setup for a quicker configuration process. Additionally, if your production community is already live with your customers, we recommend that you set up your localized categories during non-peak activity hours. Note: Creating a localized category is a similar process to creating a regular category in the community. However, after you have enabled Localized Categories with Khoros Support, additional configuration is required to map your categories appropriately once you create them. To create a localized category: Go to the Community Structure page. At the community level, click Add (plus icon). On the window, enter a Name and ID. The ID displays in the URL for the category. Note: The ID must be a single word made of only letters, numbers, dashes, and underscores with no spaces. It cannot be changed later. Optionally, enter a Description and add an Avatar for the category. Click Create. For your new localized category to work properly, you must next map it to a language. Map a localized category to a language After you have created your localized category, you need to map it to a language so the community can be translated to the correct language for the category. Click the Features > Localized Categories link in the Action Needed alert. Or, navigate to Settings > Features > Localized Categories. On the Language Mapping screen, in the Mapped to column of the language you want to map to your new category, select that category. After you map your top-level categories to the languages you have enabled in your community, your customers are directed to the language category that best matches their browser language. However, as a secondary measure, they can use the language selector to change languages. Related topics: About Localized Communities Configure localized category settings
