Khoros Communities 26.6 Release Notes
26.6 introduces Contests, a new way to spark participation, peer collaboration and recognition in your community, and delivers our largest accessibility release to date, a major step in our WCAG 2.2 AA work. It also builds on Orchestrator Scheduled Rules with more precise audiences, and brings improvements to federated search, carousels and the social feed. Email delivery gets a round of fixes, and other fixes address scheduled publishing, moderation actions, mention and follower emails, and private image access. Try everything shipped so far on Staging The Aurora features released from 26.2 through 26.5, which were introduced as Early Access, are now available on client Staging environments so you can explore and test them with your own content and configuration. Features available to try on Staging AI Moderation and Appeals, Community Language Model / Answer Assist, Community Orchestrator Customizable Email Templates with Orchestrator integration, Proactive Clarification Questions, Polls, Metric Explorer and Search Analytics, Expert Report, multi-select search filters and Author Search, Zoom event registration Cross-Board Posting, Interactive Social Feed (reactions, save and follow), Admin Review Mode for Answer Assist, Answer Requests opt-out, reaction email notifications Federated Search, Carousels (featured content banners), Orchestrator Scheduled Rules and Run Logs Please note that Production is not changed. Nothing is enabled in production without your testing and an explicit request. To enable a feature in production, tell your Customer Success Manager which features you have tested and want live New Features (Aurora) Contests: recognize and reward your members Contests give your members a fun, structured way to take part, collaborate with their peers and be recognized. Invite members to share their best work, work together in teams, vote for each other and earn rewards such as prizes, badges and ranks. Admins set everything up from a guided wizard, with no developer involvement. Rewards that recognize. For each contest, define reward tiers (for example first place, runners-up and a special mention). Each tier has a name, a description, an optional image and an optional badge, and you decide how many winners each tier has. Rewards are shown clearly on the contest page so members know what they are working toward. Badges are awarded automatically when results are announced. Three types of contest to fit your goals: Submission contest: members submit an entry (a photo, an idea, a story, a how-to) and winners are chosen by community vote or by judges. Best for user-generated content and ideas. Activity Challenge: no entries needed. Members qualify for reward tiers through what they do in your community during a set time window: posts, replies, kudos. Best for lifting everyday participation and welcoming new members. Hackathon: teams build and submit a project, and a judging panel scores it agai…136ViewsSign in to react to this post1CommentKhoros Communities 26.5 Release Notes
26.5 transforms how members discover content and how community managers curate it. Members can now search across external knowledge bases (Confluence, internal wikis, any connected source) and read results without ever leaving the community. Community managers can place editorial content banners on any page to spotlight campaigns, launches, or key articles, schedule Orchestrator rules to run on a recurring cadence, and see exactly how their automations are performing with full execution history. The release also delivers accessibility improvements and a broad batch of reliability fixes across the social feed, email templates, moderation, and the Salesforce connector. New Features (Aurora Early Access) Availability: All Early Access features are behind feature flags and must be manually enabled. Contact your Customer Success Manager to begin. Once enabled, features are fully configurable from the admin panel. Note: Through the end of 2026, we are offering our migration services at no cost for Classic users who move to Aurora AI. Contact your CSM for details Federated Search Members can now search across your connected external knowledge bases directly from the community search bar, and read the results without leaving. Admins connect and configure sources entirely through a self-service admin console, with no developer involvement, no integration projects, and no code. Connect external knowledge sources (Confluence spaces, or any REST API through the Direct API connector) from a five-tab admin console. Scope each source to the entire community or to specific boards, with per-board defaults you can apply in bulk. Stage a new source in Review, check real results in Preview, then go Live. Sources move cleanly between Live, Not Live and Archived. External results appear in their own labelled band on the search page, clearly separated from community content. Members can read a result inline or open it on the source site. Duplicate results pointing at the same external page are collapsed into one. A consent gate withholds external results from members in cookie-banner regions until they accept. Members only see external content they are entitled to; permissions are re-checked per viewer and snippets are sanitised before display. A Health dashboard tracks each source's status, response time, and failure streak, Coming next: Answer Assist will draw on federated sources when generating answers, and video results will play inline within community search results. Enablement: Federated Search is off by default. Contact your CSM to enable it. Carousels: Featured Content Banners Community managers can now place editorial content banners (similar to the featured sections on streaming or e-commerce platforms) on any community page to spotlight campaigns, product launches, events, or key articles, and guide members to what matters most. Add a carousel to any Community Home, Category Home, or Board Home page…ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsKhoros Communities 26.4 Release Notes
26.4 brings the Aurora homepage to life. Members can now react, reply inline, and save content directly from the feed without navigating away, while cross-board posting lets anyone start a discussion from any page in the community. Managers get a safe mode to evaluate Answer Assist quality before enabling it for members. Across Classic and Aurora, the release also delivers security patches, search fixes, and broad editor and stability improvements. New Features Aurora - Early Access Features The features in this section are available in Early Access for Aurora communities. They are behind feature flags and must be manually enabled — contact your Customer Success Manager to begin. Once enabled, all features are fully configurable from the admin panel. Note: Classic users can migrate to Aurora at no cost in 2026. Contact your CSM for detail Cross-Board Posting: Members can now start a post from the homepage or any category or landing page — no more navigating deep into the community structure to find the right board. Start a Discussion CTA — Admins enable a posting button on any page template via the Designer Tool. Button text is configurable (default: "Start a Discussion"). Permission-aware board picker — A searchable flat list showing only boards the user has permission to post on. Private group boards are hidden from non-members. All content types supported — discussions, blog articles, KB articles, ideas, and events. If clicked from within a specific board, that board is pre-selected in the picker. Anonymous users see the button but are redirected to sign-in on click Interactive Social Feed: Aurora's homepage Feed section transforms from a static list of post titles into a living, social feed where members can participate without breaking their browsing flow. Inline comment expansion — Click "See details" on any post to expand and read the latest comments directly in the feed. New/unread comments are surfaced first with clear visual highlighting. Inline replies — Reply to any discussion directly from the homepage feed using the same rich editor and community settings as the full thread view. Full post view — Expand the complete post body within the feed context; navigate to the full thread only when you need deeper engagement. Infinite scroll — The feed auto-loads additional posts as you scroll, with admin-configurable batch sizes and load limits. Admin controls: Enable or disable the interactive feed globally or per board from Admin → Settings → Content Features → Homepage Social Feed. Configure comment display count, infinite scroll batch size, and pilot specific boards before rolling out community-wide. One-click emergency disable option if issues arise Multi-Semantic Reactions: Move beyond a single "Like" and let members express nuanced sentiment. Reaction types include: Need This, Helpful, Insightful, Celebrate, and more — configurable per community. Reaction picker a…ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsKhoros Communities 26.2 Release Notes [Updated]
The 26.2 release introduces Aurora AI capabilities for content moderation, automated responses, and workflow orchestration. It also addresses critical security vulnerabilities, delivers search and rich text editor improvements, and resolves stability issues across analytics and content archival. New Features (Aurora — Early Access) Availability: All three features below are in early access behind feature flags — nothing activates automatically. Fully configurable from the admin panel. Contact your Customer Success Manager to enable. Classic customers should reach out to their CSM to discuss migration. AI Moderation + Appeals Automates content moderation decisions based on your community guidelines, configured in plain language. Auto-approve and auto-block: Clear-cut content is handled instantly, reducing manual review volume. Gray-area escalation: Ambiguous content is held for human review rather than auto-actioned. Member appeals: Members can submit structured appeals against moderation decisions, preserving trust without adding moderator workload. Community Language Model (CLM) / Answer Assist Provides AI-generated responses to unanswered community posts after a configurable time threshold has been reached. Community-first response window: You define how long to wait before Answer Assist activates, giving members the first opportunity to respond. Source attribution: Every AI-generated answer cites the specific authors and posts it drew from, keeping community experts visible. Community Orchestrator A rules-based automation engine that triggers actions on community events such as new registrations, first posts, and milestone achievements. Automated workflows: Configure welcome sequences, expert notifications, milestone recognition, and onboarding prompts. Event-driven execution: Actions fire automatically when defined conditions are met — set up once, runs continuously. Bugs & Security Fixes Classic Fixed search autocomplete not returning results when queries contain special characters like trademark symbols or apostrophes. Fixed cursor jumping to the top of the article when applying formatting in Firefox. Fixed message position count displaying incorrectly after submitting inline replies. Fixed missing publish events in bulk data exports for republished content. Fixed Members Online count showing inflated numbers by excluding partially registered users. Fixed search results not sorting correctly by view count. Fixed video sitemap XML validation errors affecting video SEO indexing. Fixed usernames with certain Unicode characters causing registration failures and blank display names. Fixed attachments remaining visible in the editor after sending private message replies. Fixed "Show older messages" causing page reload when clicked after switching threads. Fixed rank-up notifications not being delivered via email or private message. Fixed abuse reports failing when membe…ViewsSign in to react to this postComments
One year in, straight from us.
It has been a year since IgniteTech acquired Khoros, and I want to talk to you directly. There has been a lot of secondhand talk going around, none of it coming from us, and most of it from people who stand to gain from the telling. Enough of that. If you want to know something about Khoros, come to Khoros. Ask us. We will give it to you straight. Here is where we are. We did not buy Khoros to dress it up and sell it. That is the private equity playbook, and it is not ours. We are privately held, we keep what we acquire, and we run it for the decades, not the quarter. Khoros was losing millions. We made it profitable so it would not go dark. That took painful decisions, and I know some of them affected you. I am not going to gloss over that. It is also why Khoros is still here, on solid ground and able to invest in what comes next. And we have invested. We rebuilt the platform and shipped two AI-native products in under a year. Aurora AI reimagines community for the AI-answer-engine era and closes roughly 30% of community questions that never get a good answer. The brand-new Iris® AI replaces Care and Social Media Management, two products that ran separately for 15 years and never fully integrated. It brings social engagement and brand care into one platform, with publishing, moderating, engaging and analyzing all in one place. No other company offers enterprise community alongside enterprise social and brand care, and large enterprises are switching to us because of it. Everyone else still makes you choose. We have been the gold standard in customer community since Lithium (Khoros’ predecessor) pioneered the category in 2001, and then built the bridge to social when Lithium and Spredfast became one company, because community and social were never meant to live apart. That foundation has powered more than 4,000 community deployments since 2001 and draws 1.8 billion site visits a year. This first year post-acquisition was about putting the house in order. This next stretch is about innovation, building on the platform you count on. We are strengthening the online infrastructure and improving uptime, with faster, sharper incident response when something does go wrong. When we fix something now, we fix the cause, not the symptom. As part of that investment, we are turning on Community Guard for you, free for the next 60 days. It is a new protective layer for an internet that is not just people anymore. Communities like yours get crawled, scraped and hit by bots and automated agents that distort your analytics, consume capacity and put avoidable pressure on the experience. Community Guard catches that traffic before it reaches your community, while keeping the door open for real users and the discovery channels you actually want. The result is a cleaner, steadier community with real protection against bot abuse and traffic spikes. We are turning it on now because it is the right thing to do for our customers. Here is what all of this…ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsKhoros Communities CDN Change Notice
Hello everyone, As part of our ongoing work to improve the performance and stability of Khoros Communities, we'll be migrating our CDN over the next few weeks (exact day/time will be added as Scheduled Maintenance on status.khoros.com). Your community will not be affected The transition is seamless. Your community will remain available throughout the migration process. No action is required on your side. A note on SSL certificates If your community is currently with an AWS-issued certificate, your SSL certificate will change to one issued by Let's Encrypt as part of this migration. This is expected behavior and does not require any configuration changes from your team. Both are publicly trusted CAs, so end users won't see any difference in their user experience. If your community is served through a different provider, the SSL certificate change will not apply to you. Questions? If you have any questions or concerns, please reach out to your customer representative.ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsKhoros Communities 26.3 Release Notes
26.3 helps make your community a place members return to. Managers can create branded email templates tied to Orchestrator for end-to-end outreach, while Polls and Clarification Questions improve engagement and answer quality. AI Moderation is more reliable at scale. The release also adds Metric Explorer, plus search upgrades and Zoom event registration. New Features (Aurora - Early Access) Availability: All features in early access are behind feature flags and must be manually enabled by contacting your Customer Success Manager. They are fully configurable from the admin panel once enabled. You may enable select Early Access products. Note: Classic users can migrate to Aurora at no cost in 2026. Contact your CSM for details. Customizable Email Templates Email communications from your community - registration confirmations, notification digests, workflow alerts - have historically required developer involvement to customize. Branding changes, copy updates, or new email types meant filing tickets and waiting. Community managers had no self-service control over one of the most direct channels for bringing members back. What you can do now: Create and manage branded, customizable email templates directly from the admin panel. With full control over content, layout, and branding, no developer dependencies required. Template creation & management Self-service editor for creating and customizing email templates with branding, custom content, and layout control. Organize templates with categories and search for easy management at scale. Customize emails across community communications - including registration, notifications, and workflow-triggered emails. Orchestrator integration Created templates can be accessed directly in Orchestrator automation rules — when a trigger fires (such as User Registers, Solution Accepted, Topic Posted, or Role Granted), the Orchestrator sends your branded template automatically. Visual compatibility indicators show which templates work with which triggers, with placeholder validation against available data. Enablement: All existing community emails continue to function without any changes. To adopt the new system, the Khoros team runs a migration script that generates your templates. You review and sign off on the migrated templates, and only after your approval does the Khoros team activate the new flow. Contact your CSM to begin the process. Proactive Clarification Questions for Answer Assist Helps members get better, faster answers by guiding them to provide the right context upfront without adding friction to the posting experience. Post-publish flow: Posts publish as per the moderation settings. For question-type posts, the system surfaces AI-generated clarification questions in a slide-in panel (desktop) or bottom sheet (mobile). CM-guided generation: Community managers provide example clarification questions to guide the AI. The system then generates both the ques…ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsKhoros Communities 25.12 Release Notes
The Khoros Communities 25.12 release delivers extensive accessibility improvements across both Classic and Aurora platforms, critical security fixes, significant search and analytics enhancements, and numerous stability improvements for content management, rich text editing, and API functionality. Classic Applied input sanitization for survey form submissions to ensure data integrity and security. Fixed slide-out navigation menu accessibility violations including improper button element nesting and focus management issues affecting screen readers. Fixed spoiler tags scrolling to page top instead of expanding content on first visit due to script loading latency. Fixed Q&A structured data linking accepted answer URLs to author profiles instead of actual solution posts, improving SEO accuracy. Fixed LiQL query operator "!=" to correctly apply multiple exclusion conditions, allowing users to exclude multiple nodes in a single query. Fixed code snippet syntax highlighting disappearing when editing posts containing li-code elements. Fixed post counter incorrectly decreasing when deleting product idea status updates. Enhanced V2 API error messages to specify which field and content caused validation failures, providing actionable feedback to API consumers. Fixed post approval failures in moderation manager showing false success messages when approving spam in archived threads. Fixed kudos leaderboard displaying empty slots when deleted users were included in rankings. Fixed API errors when querying subscriptions for label objects. Enabled text key scoping for TKB template selection page to support template-specific customization. Fixed API errors when retrieving posts containing malformed CSS classes in HTML content. Optimized settings editor to reduce search reindex latency from 20-90 seconds to under 3 seconds when updating large custom settings. Added comprehensive accessibility improvements including: proper combobox roles for all search and autocomplete fields; ARIA expanded/collapsed states for image upload controls; corrected button roles for file upload and avatar controls; keyboard focus management in settings tabs; screen reader announcements for file upload status messages; and notification settings sections defined as proper headings for navigation. Aurora Fixed critical authorization vulnerability in GraphQL endpoints to properly enforce permission checks for privileged operations. Implemented multi-select functionality for idea status filter in ideas widget, providing filtering parity with Classic Community. Implemented SEO improvements for tag pages including lowercase URLs, updated robots meta tags, and dynamic meta descriptions. Enabled notifications and email alerts for followed tags, resolving "No activity yet" displays despite active content. Fixed image lightbox not opening when clicking images in post replies. Fixed spotlight search bar disappearing for anonymous users when …ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsKhoros Communities 26.1 Release Notes [Prod Release Date Updated]
The Khoros Communities 26.1 release delivers critical security patches including RCE vulnerability remediation, extensive accessibility improvements for mobile screen readers, and stability fixes across moderation workflows, content management, and API functionality. Classic Fixed badges being awarded before posts were approved on pre-moderated boards. Fixed anchor links within posts failing to scroll to their target sections. Fixed quoting posts with code samples throwing errors for users with Simple HTML permissions. Fixed top contributors widget displaying users in incorrect order. Fixed Table of Contents button not appearing in blog article editor when enabled. Fixed search autocomplete retaining incorrect selection when cursor moved away quickly. Fixed Accept Solution option missing from Group posts. Fixed solutions leaderboard showing fewer users than configured when role filters were applied. Fixed external video embeds from Brightcove and other providers failing to render. Fixed Vimeo embeds with longer video IDs disappearing after publishing. Fixed "Show older messages" in Private Messages causing page refresh on repeated clicks. Fixed ban edit popup displaying empty for deleted users. Fixed product and tag autocomplete failing with special characters like "/" and "_". Fixed GroupHub subscription status displaying incorrectly after page reload. Fixed admin metrics date range filter returning results outside specified dates. Fixed orphaned HTML appearing in posts when mentioned users were deleted. Added support for .f3z file attachments. Fixed Hi-Labels validation incorrectly triggering when editing attachments or comments. Fixed role filter in Community Analytics throwing errors. Fixed TKB and Blog workflow notification emails not being sent when spam filtering was triggered. Fixed archive search filter counts showing zero despite archived content existing. Fixed user search filter state lost after browser back navigation. Fixed Safari on macOS intermittent failures with sort filters and post actions. Fixed email validation not being enforced during registration, allowing accounts without email addresses. Fixed notifications not being delivered for posts on pre-moderated forums after approval. Fixed Private Messages failing to load for users with certain message history patterns. Changed PDF attachments to use native browser viewer instead of third-party preview. Implemented clipboard content sanitization in rich text editor to prevent XSS attacks. Added accessibility improvements including: visible focus indicators on message links; tooltip text visibility at 200% zoom; proper ARIA attributes for image and video upload modals; keyboard controls for Brightcove video timeline; and corrected form field descriptions for screen readers. Aurora Fixed required custom fields not displaying in Add User form, preventing member creation. Fixed group names exceeding 40 charac…ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsKhoros Communities 25.11 Release Notes
The Khoros Communities 25.11 release delivers critical security updates, comprehensive accessibility improvements, enhanced survey targeting capabilities, and numerous stability fixes across content management, authentication, and search functionality. Classic Applied critical security patches addressing vulnerabilities in jQuery and TinyMCE components. Enhanced username validation to prevent impersonation attempts using visually similar characters from different language scripts. Improved flood control performance, significantly reducing processing time for users with many product associations. Fixed Rich Text Editor alignment not applying correctly to text with inline formatting such as bold or italic. Fixed custom table background colors and styling being stripped when saving blog posts. Fixed Events module errors preventing users from creating, publishing, or viewing events after upgrade. Fixed deleted article history records causing entire version history to be wiped when removing individual draft versions. Added comprehensive accessibility improvements including: keyboard operability for Reply and Follow buttons; proper carousel navigation with skip options; corrected focus order in Tags modal; disabled auto-focus in private message compose modal; added missing alt attributes to images throughout the application; and programmatically associated error messages with form fields. Aurora Implemented advanced survey targeting with configurable prompts based on user authentication status, roles, location, and visit patterns. Fixed critical memory leak in integration points registry that was causing system crashes and performance degradation after 24-40 hours of operation. Fixed private messages failing to load for users with large recipient lists. Fixed users being unable to join hidden groups via email invitations. Enhanced search functionality to properly handle Traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters. Fixed language preference cookie expiring after 24 hours instead of persisting for the configured 30-day period. Fixed CSV export failures when survey responses were linked to deleted user accounts, now properly marking these as "Anonymous". Added dimension validation for image uploads to prevent pixel flood attacks that could cause memory exhaustion and system crashes. Fixed navigation error flash when users return from profile pages to discussion threads using the browser back button. Fixed blog article delete confirmation dialog intermittently not appearing for users. Fixed page index resetting to first page when unfollowing items on the Follows and Notifications page. Fixed navigation links being replaced instead of appended when adding more than 10 links in the community header. Fixed missing locale parameter causing incorrect privacy policy URLs during SSO registration. Fixed Aurora search bar displaying category IDs instead of user-friendly board names as placeholder text…ViewsSign in to react to this postComment
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