About KB Guides
KB Guides is designed to enhance the way you host and navigate knowledge base content within your online community. KB Guides offer a structured and user-friendly approach to presenting valuable information, making it easier for members to find what they need. With KB Guides, brands can efficiently organize and share resources such as training materials, onboarding documents, FAQs, and more. This ensures a seamless and informative experience for community members, helping them access relevant content effortlessly. Enablement KB Guides are enabled by default in Communities Aurora v24.07 and above for all communities using knowledge bases. Permissions Members with the Create, edit, publish, and manage articles permission on the knowledge base board can add a KB Guide to it. Guides widget To start with creating KB Guides, you must add the Guides widget to a Knowledge Base Dashboard template. Set Type in the Guides widget as per your requirement: To view the articles as Type Structured Guide Guides Manually-sorted list Manually-sorted Articles Guides widget configuration Related Topics Adding KB Guides Guides widget configuration General actions on KB Guides, Articles, and ChaptersAurora: Set community to offline mode
If you are performing maintenance on your community, you may want to prevent activity from taking place as you resolve issues. With offline mode, you can present a notice to visitors so they know maintenance is underway and that they cannot participate until the community comes back online. When the community is in offline mode, members cannot: sign in read content create new posts or reply to any content like posts, mark posts as solutions, tag posts, or edit posts reply to messages in their inbox or create new private messages follow or manage existing follows update their member settings Members can still receive email notifications if content is posted by admins during the time the community is offline. When the community is in offline mode, admins are still able to: sign in to the community post content modify site settings update the theme use back-end functionality such as APIs Enable offline mode Open the Account menu and go to Settings > System. Below General, toggle on Enable community offline mode. Confirm this action by selecting Take Community Offline. Customize your maintenance page You can customize the title and message on your maintenance page so that your visitors know what to expect when they reach your community while it is offline. To customize the message: On Settings > System > General, below Enable community offline mode, select Edit beside Title and Description. In the Edit Offline Text window, edit the Title and Description as desired. Select Save.Aurora: Community email options
Khoros Communities offers several email configuration options to ensure the deliverability and security of emails sent from your community. This article goes over the common email configurations that Khoros provides in a standard community launch. Note: Additional email configuration options might be feasible but aren't included in your community launch. Consult with your Khoros representative for more information. Modify sender name and address You can modify the sender name and address of community emails in the admin settings. For example, emails are sent from “Community Mailer” and "mailer@us.khoros-mail.com" by default in US-based communities. You can change this to something better tailored to your brand, such as “Acme Community” and "notifications@mailer.acme.com." Refer to Edit the Aurora community email sender name and address for steps. SendGrid SendGrid is Khoros’ current default relay used by most of our customers. SendGrid features higher mail delivery rates and is capable of handling much more traffic. However, due to our infrastructure, SendGrid does not support strict DMARC policies (“none” is supported). SendGrid is required for the Community Analytics (CA) metrics reporting feature. We do not support Community Analytics email reporting for any other relay type. Sender Policy Framework (SPF) Khoros strongly recommends that all customers update their SPF records to include the region-appropriate Khoros domain. This helps provide a good balance of deliverability of mail from Communities, reduce setup time, and increase security. Sender Policy Framework (SPF) records enable domain owners to publish a list of IP addresses or subnets that are authorized to send emails on their behalf. The goal is to reduce the amount of spam and fraud by making it more difficult for malicious senders to disguise their identity. SPF records can be set only on the A DNS record, not a CNAME DNS record such as (community.customer.com). We strongly recommend that the sender address is a subdomain of your primary domain and that the SPF record is set on that subdomain. For example, if your primary domain is [customer.com], we recommend the sender address to be a subdomain such as [anything@mail.customer.com] and to set the SPF record there. Refer to Configure SPF records for community emails for more information. DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail) is an email authorization technique that leverages unique keys to digitally sign mail. This is done by adding an encrypted DKIM signature to the message header. DKIM helps combat certain techniques often used in phishing and email spam, such as emails with forged sender addresses that appear to come from legitimate organizations. This configuration requires coordination with Khoros in order to exchange key information and configure the Khoros mail relay properly. Note: Strict DMARC policies are not supported and require a Custom Relay instead. Refer to Configure DKIM for community emails for more information. Custom Relay In the rare case that none of the above options are acceptable, you can use your own mail servers for delivery. Essentially, all email outbound from Community are sent to your mail server first and then out to complete the delivery. This solution involves additional engagement with the Khoros Professional Services team.Aurora: Configure DKIM for community emails
DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail) is an email authorization technique that leverages unique keys to digitally sign mail. This is done by adding an encrypted DKIM signature to the message header. It helps combat certain techniques often used in phishing and email spam, such as emails with forged sender addresses that appear to come from legitimate organizations. Our customers commonly implement DKIM records together with SPF to meet DMARC policies. This can provide better protection for your domain against malicious emails sent on behalf of your domains. Learn more about SPF setup. Note: Khoros cannot support a custom DKIM implementation in conjunction with SendGrid custom relays. Custom DKIM implementations also prevent the use of Communities Email Analytics. To perform this implementation with Khoros: Provide Khoros the mailer address to be used. Refer to Edit the Aurora community email sender name and address for best practices regarding the address choice. Khoros will provide the DKIM selector and key, which your teams will then install on the target mailer subdomain. Validate the DKIM configuration using tools such as mxtoolbox. The domain to check is the part following the @ symbol in your mailer address. For example, if your address is notifications@mailer.customer.com, then the domain to check is mailer.customer.com. Ensure all checks pass with the domain and selector. Once the DKIM configuration on your DNS entry is validated, Khoros completes the final Community configuration. Best Practices Refer to Edit the Aurora community email sender name and address for best practices regarding the choice of mailer address. You must use DKIM if you have restrictive DMARC records in place, even if you do not want to DKIM sign emails. The strictness is indicated below: Strict - Reject Strict - Quarantine (with a 25%+ apply percentage) policy Relaxed - Quarantine (with a < 25% apply percentage) policy Relaxed - None policy DKIM deliverability is not as high as with SPF only due to the IP addresses of the Khoros DKIM mail relays being newer (~2020) and part of AWS’s IP space. These relay servers may never be considered trusted by some email vendors for this reason, thus being more susceptible to emails being blocked. You must ensure there is no SP (Subdomain Policy) attribute present on the same subdomain. This can result in your top level DMARC policy being applied to your subdomain, and as a result, email not being delivered. To do this: Go to https://mxtoolbox.com/DMARC.aspx. Add your domain in the field (for example, khoros.com or everything after the @). Select DMARC Lookup and see if an SP message is displayed, which should look like this: “Organization Domain of this sub-domain is: example.com Inbox Receivers will apply example.com DMARC record to mail sent from mail.example.com”Aurora: Configure SPF records for community emails
Khoros strongly recommends that all customers update their SPF records to include the region-appropriate Khoros domain. This provides a good balance of deliverability of mail from Communities, reduces setup time, increases security, and allows the use of email metrics. Find the region-appropriate line below, replacing “customer.com” with your own subdomain to add to your SPF record on the subdomain used to send emails: For APAC Communities: customer.com 86400 IN TXT "v=spf1 include:ap.khoros-mail.com --all" For NA Communities: customer.com. 86400 IN TXT "v=spf1 include:us.khoros-mail.com -all" For EMEA Communities: customer.com. 86400 IN TXT "v=spf1 include:eu.khoros-mail.com -all" This step enables Communities to securely send emails on your behalf from that subdomain. Verify that the SPF record is publicly accessible and correctly configured. You can use a SPF Check and Lookup tool to accomplish this task. Configure the email address as described in Edit the Aurora community email sender name and address. Validate your configuration by taking any action in your community that will trigger an email. Verify that the emails do not go into your spam/junk folder and have the intended sender address. Note: This process applies only for email configurations involving relaxed or no DMARC policies. If you require a stricter DMARC policy or any alternative configuration, contact Khoros or refer to Community email options for additional details.Pull different Aurora community content into an RSS feed using URLs
You can pull different community content from different levels in the community in an RSS feed using URLs. To pull the most recent RSS results for the entire community, use: https://yourdomain.com/t5/s/[CommunityID]/rss/Community For example, for Lithosphere, you'd use: https://community.khoros.com/t5/s/lithosphere/rss/Community To pull content over the RSS for a category, use: https://yourdomain.com/t5/s/[CommunityID]/rss/Category?category.id=[CategoryID] For example, if Lithosphere had a category with the ID of "Social," you'd use: https://community.khoros.com/t5/s/lithosphere/rss/Category?category.id=Social Note: Category IDs are case sensitive. To pull content over the RSS for a KB, use: https://yourdomain.com/t5/s/[CommunityID]/rss/Community?interaction.style=tkb For example, for Lithosphere you'd use: https://community.khoros.com/t5/s/lithosphere/rss/Community?interaction.style=tkbAbout Content permissions
You can adjust permissions related to content at the community, container (category & group), and board level. Some permissions are set to Deny by default while others are set to Grant by default. At the container level and the board level, permission defaults and role permissions are inherited from the parent level. In those cases, the Inherit button is displayed in green to indicate that the permission was set to Grant at the parent level or red to indicate that the permission was set to Deny at the parent level. As an admin, you can manage these permissions. To manage content-related permission defaults at the community level: Note: To manage this permission at a lower level, go to the [Place] Permissions page and edit the permission defaults for that level. To manage this permission for a particular role, go to the [Place] Permissions page at the desired level of the community and edit the permissions of the individual roles. Go to the Roles and Permissions page for the community. Beside Community Permissions Defaults, select Edit. Review permissions in the following areas: Blogs Content Events Ideas Knowledge Bases Select Deny or Grant as required. Unless you have specified different permissions for certain roles or levels below the community level (a category, group, or board), these selections affect all members of the community. Content permissions While Forum permissions are granted by the Content permissions, Blogs, Event Boards, Ideas boards, and Knowledge Bases have distinct permission sections for content type-specific tasks. The Content permissions are provided for general content access and tasks and relate to all content types. Follow the links in the table below to learn more about the tasks granted by these permissions. Permission Default Related permissions in content type sections Read discussions and content Grant Blogs: Read posts and Read comments Ideas: Read ideas and comments Reply to discussions and content Grant Blogs: Comment on posts Events: Comment on events Ideas: Comment on ideas Knowledge Bases: Comment on articles Start discussions and new content Grant Blogs: Start new posts Events: Post new events Ideas: Post new ideas Knowledge Bases: Create, edit, publish, and manage articles Edit own posts Deny Blogs: Edit own published posts Events: Edit own events Ideas: Manage ideas and comments Knowledge Bases: Edit own published articles Edit any post Deny Blogs: Edit any published post Events: Edit all events Ideas: Manage ideas and comments Knowledge Bases: Edit any published article Move content Deny Blogs: Manage any posts and Manage own posts Delete own post Deny Blogs: Manage own posts Events: Delete own events Knowledge Bases: Delete own articles Delete any post Deny Blogs: Manage any posts Events: Delete all events Ideas: Manage ideas and comments Upload file attachments Deny Embed external content Grant Turn on link hyperlinking Grant Use simple HTML in posts Grant Use advanced HTML in posts Deny Use full HTML in posts Deny Make content read only Deny Post read-only content Deny Bypass moderation Deny Blogs: Bypass comment moderation Events: Bypass comment moderation Ideas: Bypass moderation Knowledge Bases: Bypass comment moderation Related topics: About Aurora Community site structure About Aurora Content TypesAurora: Update community vanity URL
There are several actions you must take before we can change a vanity name on our end. The change is straightforward if your community is a non-SSO community, but if you use SSO there's a broader range of things to cover. As always, all changes should first be tested on stage if possible, and this is especially true if you're using SSO. Note: We highly recommend contacting our Professional Services team to complete this process, especially when using a custom SSO setup. Preparation Create a CNAME in your DNS. Point the CNAME at your internal community hostname (for example, communityid.community.com). Allow 48 hours to pass after steps 1 and 2 so the DNS can propagate the internet. Update the community URL Check your community settings and change any hard-coded URLs pointing to the old vanity name. A redirect largely covers this, but eliminating any non-needed page requests/redirects is always a recommended best practice. If you're using SSO and this change affects your SSO sign-in/sign-out/registration URLs, be sure to update them in Community Settings > System > Account and Privacy after the change is made on the Khoros side. IMPORTANT: if you're using SSO, make sure this domain change will not affect your authentication process. In most cases, SSO is domain-centric and works only for requests coming from the domain specified in the cookie, so if the domain is not updated in your SSO it could completely break authentication. For example, if your community URL was community.abc.com and your SSO was set for requests only from .abc.com, changing your vanity name to community.def.com would break authentication, since a cookie from one domain cannot be read by another. You need to update your SSO to ensure it's set to work with the new domain. If you're using a Salesforce integration, check with whomever handled that integration to ensure the change won't cause any unwanted problems. In some cases, that person might have to make changes to accommodate the change. Multiple vanity names are not officially supported, but if you plan to use more than one vanity name you MUST contact Khoros Support to have all of your domains added to a vanity domain allowlist. Any domain not in the allowlist redirects back to the active vanity name we have on record. After all of the above have been reviewed, tested, and you're ready to proceed, the remaining is completed by Khoros: Update the vanity name. Add any desired redirects (301) from the old vanity name to the new one so anyone who has bookmarks/favorites is redirected to the same page using the new domain. Add any other optional redirects you'd like in place. Depending on the number and/or type of redirects requested (for instance, more than a dozen), this may require an engagement through our Professional Services group. Restart the community during the next available maintenance window to apply changes. As noted, if you're using SSO we need to coordinate with you so that you can make any required SSO changes on your end at the same time we update the hostname on our end.Knowledge Base Article content widget configuration
The Knowledge Base Article template contains the Knowledge Base Article content widget that houses the body of an article. While you cannot delete this widget, you can modify some of its features to customize the community experience. Page item elements Date: Shows the date on which the article was published (September 3, 2024) or how long ago it was published (3 days ago) depending on your settings. Versions: A badge displays the version of the article. Helpfulness: Shows the “Was this article helpful?” section with sentiment emojis below the article. Guide navigation: In the left panel, shows the table of contents for the knowledge base guide where this article lives (see About KB Guides). Display contributors as None: No contributors are shown. Link: Select the View Contributors link to open contributors in another window. Detailed panel: The list of contributors shows below the article. Related topics: About Knowledge Bases About KB Guides Guides widget configurationAurora: Reverse proxy Best Practices
During pre-sales and launch, our customers often ask us about reverse proxy and vanity URLs. The question usually spawns from branding and search engine optimization (SEO) concerns. Some customers have corporate rules around aggregating all traffic for their domain. Branding, SEO, and corporate guidelines are all reasonable business considerations. In a branding-motivated scenario, a customer may want to use a subdirectory of the customer’s website, such as www.customer_name.com/community instead of our standard subdomain structure community.customer_name.com. With regard to SEO, you can find many articles that discuss how subdomains affect search engine optimization. The tricky part is determining whether the SEO benefit of a subdirectory structure is offset by latency potentially introduced with a reverse proxy. Khoros requires that any customer use of a reverse proxy be implemented in accordance with the appropriate implementation process specified by Khoros and set forth in the Statement of Work (SOW) that Khoros provides. The SOW sets out the process and important information that must be provided to support such implementation. Note: If you are using the Khoros Care with your Community, you also need to ensure that Care is able to communicate through the reverse proxy to Community in both stage and production. If you have IP address restrictions or other access restrictions for your reverse proxy, this might prevent integrations between Community and Care from operating correctly. What is a reverse proxy? In a reverse proxy implementation, community members do not access the community by directly connecting to Khoros servers. Instead, community members make requests to the proxy, which then makes requests to the community on the person's behalf. More generally speaking, any configuration that doesn’t include a CNAME to Community is a reverse proxy. What does Khoros recommend? As a general rule, Khoros strongly recommends against customer-controlled reverse proxy setups as these types of configuration introduce an unknown and uncontrolled layer between the end user (your customers) and our application. Occasionally, we have customers that do not discuss the concerns/goals described earlier with Khoros and add a reverse proxy in front of the community, managing the configuration and maintenance on their own. This practice often causes serious issues with community performance and stability that are difficult to debug. If you truly need a reverse proxy, we provide configuration options to create the most stable experience possible for you and your customers, and we have recommendations and best practices that we’ve learned over the years. Thoroughly discuss using a reverse proxy with Khoros, and work with Khoros Support to configure your request/response flow correctly. Using a reverse proxy—even with Khoros guidance and configuration—comes with costs that customers should understand before making the request. You may find that a reverse proxy's cost outweighs the benefits, or that Khoros has alternative solutions to consider about branding, security, and SEO that meet your needs without introducing a reverse proxy’s complexities. Let’s look at the complexities of customer-controlled reverse proxy implementations more closely: It's a black box to us. Customer-maintained proxies, using a technology of your choosing, are extremely difficult to debug and support without access to your infrastructure and specific proxy configurations. Coordinated debugging is required and can be very time-consuming. Working with Khoros to set up a reverse proxy integration properly pays off in the long run. Issues with a reverse proxy can confuse you and your customers. For example, if misconfiguration or performance issues with a reverse proxy arise, it looks like an issue with Khoros's application/infrastructure to end users. Similarly, Khoros has less information distinguishing users because all requests come from the proxy, which may be pooling connections, transforming requests, or otherwise acting differently than users’ browsers. It often takes some time to find the root cause of an issue. We’ve observed upwards of 2 times the response time for some customer-controlled reverse proxy setups, which can negatively impact SEO and dramatically reduce user retention. The reverse proxy flow has more steps than the standard Khoros response/request flow. More steps translates to extra server resources, a larger attackable surface area, extra latency for the user, and a performance bottleneck. A reverse proxy introduces an additional potential point of failure that is outside of Khoros’ control. If the proxy goes down, there's nothing Khoros can do to rectify the situation. It's entirely dependent on customer resources. Due to the lack of transparency, confusing indicators, and other complexities associated with a reverse proxy, the customer is responsible for verifying the source of any performance issues arising in a reverse proxy configuration. Khoros is not responsible for any performance issues related to or caused by a customer’s use of a reverse proxy. Therefore, it is critical that customers work with Khoros to implement a reverse proxy properly in order to minimize adverse effects. Okay, but what can really go wrong? Need some more concrete details? Here are a few issues we’ve encountered with customers who have attempted a reverse proxy implementation without Khoros guidance and proper community configuration: DNS issues: With incorrect DNS setup for the proxy or when pointing the proxy to Khoros servers incorrectly, the proxy can fail to connect. The failure might not happen at setup time but later when DNS records expire or when Khoros makes infrastructure changes. Examples we have seen include getting stuck in an infinite loop of self-requests, pointing at the wrong servers when we change IP addresses, getting turned away as invalid clients, or repeatedly being redirected to their own URL. The proxy fails to pass destination data from the original request: When this happens, we have no way of knowing the host and port that the end user (your customer) requested. We see only the host/port that the proxy requested. This incongruity can generate links and redirects with the wrong destination. In turn, if vanity hostname redirects are enabled, then the end user (your customer) is either kicked off the proxy or cannot access the community due to infinite redirects. Missing or incorrect client IP: If the reverse proxy doesn’t send the client IP, Khoros cannot get the end user IP. This makes all visitors appear to be from the same computer, which affects per-IP rate limiting and flood detection, IP bans, IP-based analytics in Community Analytics, IP-based geolocation, the Administrator IP-locking security feature, and the User IP address shown in reporting mechanisms. Response transformation: Actions such as injecting markup and JavaScript into the response has caused breakage for end users (your customers) that we could not reproduce or fix. What Khoros needs from you Your SOW order outlines the details of a reverse proxy integration. Here are a few things you can expect us to ask for: Emergency contact information: A person/team on call that we can call in the case of any integration issues, performance degradations, or outages SSL: We will use a secret header with a key to establish trust. Distributed proxy integration requires SSL to avoid the secret and key from being sniffed. These details are worked out during implementation. Proxy headers: We need to know which proxy headers you’re going to send. We require all of the following headers (these are the default, but they are customizable): X-Community-Proxy-Key: This passes the security key provided above and ensures the communication is really coming from your RP X-Community-Real-IP: Original user's IP address X-Forwarded-Host: Originally requested domain X-Forwarded-Proto: Originally requested protocol Requirements for a successful integration Make sure your proxy servers are robust, redundant, stable, and well-monitored. Connect from the proxy to the community via HTTPS for all requests. We also expect your proxy to require HTTPS for the end user. Make sure the 2 proxy headers above are populated correctly on every request. Point the proxy at the internal domain name provided by Khoros (for example, <your-company>.community.com). Do not configure using IP addresses. The community IP address may change at any time. It is recommended to preserve the Host header (for example, use "Incoming Host Header" for Forward Host Header in Akamai). It is acceptable not to preserve the Host header from the client. If you choose not to preserve it, you can pass the end-user request host using the X-Forwarded-Host header. The Host header should still reflect the internal domain provided by Khoros. If you decide not to preserve the Host header, let us know so we can configure it accordingly. proxy.allowForwardedHeader.host = true Do not alter the request or response (including all the headers and cookies) — be completely hands off to avoid regressions that are difficult to debug. If you must transform the request, let us know what you will be doing, and obey the W3C Guidelines for Web Content Transformation Proxies. We do NOT support CDN along with Reverse Proxy implementation, so alert us if you plan to use a reverse proxy so that we can take you out of our CDN. Khoros cannot update robots.txt in reverse proxy communities. You must work with your own IT team to update your robots.txt at the root level. Testing/Troubleshooting Both proxy headers, X-Community-Real-IP and X-Community-Proxy-Key, are mandatory to access the community in a reverse proxy setup across all instances. Consequently, any testing that bypasses the reverse proxy and directly targets our server must use a browser plugin (such as ModHeader for Chrome), to include both secret headers in the request. Still have questions? If you have questions about a reverse proxy implementation not answered in this article, or if you have implementation questions specific to your proxy configuration, discuss them with your Khoros Customer Success Manager.
