Curious about Online Community product updates? If so, you've come to the right place.

Questions & Answers Community Type

NOTE: This new feature is scheduled for release on October 20, 2020.

Admins can now enable a Question & Answers option for a community so that its members can post questions -- and post answers to those questions!

The feature is enabled at the Community Type level (see Enable Questions & Answers). After the option is set, any new communities based on that Community Type will inherit the feature.
The Question to be answered post type can be used independent of or alongside the standard Open-ended Discussion post type in a community.
Admins can edit, moderate, and delete questions and answers (see Manage Questions & Answers).
Members can click to indicate that they i) have the same question and ii) found a particular answer helpful.

This new feature presents another way that you can encourage communication and engagement in your community, as well as giving members another way to help one another.

NOTE: For a closer look at how to enable this new feature, moderate questions and answers, and update the text of question thread options, see the Discussions section of the knowledge base.

Nesting rows in Page Designer

NOTE: The following update was released on October 07, 2020.

Admins can now "nest" rows when building or editing a community page. Nesting is the ability to place a row inside an existing row, effectively creating a layered row structure.

EXAMPLE: The image below illustrates nesting a 3-column row in the right column of a previously placed 2-column row.

This enhancement allows you to more finely tune how your content displays. The flexibility of being able to layer the different types of rows allows for greater control and more creativity. You can more easily group related content (e.g., related text and images) so that it is better organized for your audience.

NOTE: For a closer look at how to use this new functionality, see Nesting Rows.

Engagement Benchmark Score

NOTE: The following update will be released on July 01, 2020.

Engagement Benchmark Score (EBS) is a new performance metric that Super Admins can use to see how their community site's activity, value, and reach performance compares with others belonging to the same organizational type and industry. The EBS page is easily accessible by clicking BENCHMARK tab on the main dashboard in the Admin interface.

Super Admins can see a comprehensive, monthly snapshot of data that details their community site's:

Score - an average score based on the following three community-engagement factors.
Activity - a measure of how many users have created content on the community site.
Value - a measure of all user engagement (e.g., comments and replies) that the Activity generated.
Reach - a measure of how many users have performed an Activity versus total active members.

As a Super Admin, you can:

See when the latest EBS score was generated, how it was calculated, and get tips on how to improve it.
Use this information to encourage more and better community engagement.
Print and/or save a copy of the score to share with peers and stakeholders.

To learn all about this new performance-reporting feature, see Engagement Benchmark Score.

Concepts / Ideation

NOTE: The following update was released on May 28, 2020.

There is a new Concepts section on the Admin > Community > Moderation > Settings page.

Ideation posts that are subject to moderation are now included in moderation notification email messages, if these notifications are configured for the account. See Manage Your Site's Moderation Queue.
Admins can use this section to manage who should receive notification email messages when Ideation posts hit the Moderation queue. See Moderation Notifications.

Ideation

NOTE: The following update was released on May 13, 2020.

Several improvements were made to the use of the Ideation feature. These changes bring it in line with other user-created content in Discussions, Libraries, and Blogs.

Ideas now count as a user contribution and are included in the counts for the Moderate First-Time Contributors and Contribution Frequency settings in Admin > Community > Moderation > Settings. See Moderation Notifications.
Ideas are now moderated along with other contributions (discussion posts, library uploads, and blog posts) when a moderated user posts an idea. See Manage Your Site's Moderation Queue.
Ideas will now be scanned by the new Watch Words feature (via Admin > Community > Moderation > Watch Words) and be subject to the feature's settings. See Moderation Watch Words.

Moderation Watch Words

NOTE: The following update was released on April 23, 2020.

Moderation – A new feature, Watch Words, is now available in the Admin interface. With this feature, Super Admins can opt to automatically moderate offensive words or replace a word with a series of asterisks. Learn more about this feature in Moderation Watch Words.

Blog Moderation – Blogs associated to communities now inherit the community's moderation settings. Blogs in self-moderated communities can be marked as inappropriate. Those who receive moderation email notifications for their community will receive alerts when blogs are moderated, too.

My Inbox

NOTE: The following update was released on April 15, 2020.

Several enhancements have been made to My Inbox in user Profiles.

Back to Inbox button - When a user opens a message from their inbox and then clicks this button, they are returned to the page on which they opened the message.
When a user views a message received from an email notification and then clicks this button, they are directed to the first page of their inbox.
Next and Previous buttons - Open messages now have Next (message) and Previous (message) buttons so that users can more easily navigate between successive messages without having to return to the inbox list.
Private Message - Users can compose a new private message from their inbox.

Page Designer

NOTE: The following update was released on April 1, 2020.

Several enhancements have been made to Page Designer.

Performance improvements - The page now loads and saves more quickly.
Visual changes - The grey background was removed and the color scheme lightened.
Action - The drag-and-drop action now highlights on the page where item blocks can be placed.
Collapse option - HTML item blocks can be collapsed to display more of the page and simplify moving content.
Edit - The page publish attribution and state are now visible on Edit.
CSS class names - These can now be added to rows for better targeting.

Item Blocks (Content and Widget)

There are a few notable changes to the appearance and behavior of item blocks.

The name/title of item blocks now display in the header.
A block's action icons now display next to the title.
You can now double-click an item block to edit it.
There's a new Copy to Clipboard action.

Copy to Clipboard

Copy any item block to the clipboard for easy pasting across pages.
Copied item blocks remain on the clipboard for the duration of the editing session.
There is no limit to the number of item blocks that can be copied to the clipboard.
Copied item blocks can be deleted from the clipboard at any time during the session.

New My Inbox tab

NOTE: The following update was released on March 25, 2020.

Inbox was moved from the My Account tab and is now own tab, My Inbox, on the user Profile page, making it more accessible.

Also, the New Message button now displays the unread messages count.

Moderation settings

NOTE: The update below is scheduled for release on September 18, 2019.

There is a new section, Contributor Settings, in the Community > Communities > Moderate Settings modal. The section has two new settings that admins can use to manage new contributors and contributions.

Limit Contribution Frequency

Admins can use the "contribution frequency limit" setting to specify a community-wide per-user maximum for the number of contributions (discussion posts and library uploads) in a specified time period. Use this setting to mitigate spam attempts in open communities where membership is not vetted or managed in a database.

NOTE: This setting is enabled by default and limited to 10 contributions in 5 minutes. Super Admin contributions are excluded from this threshold.

If you need help changing or disabling this setting, create a case.

Moderate New Contributors

Moderate first-time contributors is a setting with which admins can set a threshold for the number of contributions (by new contributors only) that must be approved by an admin. After the threshold has been met, that contributor can freely contribute to discussions that are not fully moderated without admin approval.

If you need help enabling this setting, create a case.

NOTE: This setting is applicable to all pre-approval contributions, which include discussion posts and library uploads. This setting is off by default.

To learn more about moderation in your community, see Manage Your Site's Moderation Queue.

Registrant Roster - bulk-add registrants

NOTE: The update below is scheduled for release on August 14, 2019.

Previously, admins could only register users for an event via its Registrant Roster one user at a time. While suitable if only adding one or two people, it was time consuming when numerous additions were needed.

This update gives you an additional method that's community based. Now, you can select a community and either add a few members OR all community members at once.

How it works

To bulk-add a community's members to an event, navigate to its Registrant Roster and click Manage > Add Registrants.

In the dialog, click the Register menu to view each of your site's communities. Select a community to view all of its members.

If you only need to add one or two, or even a handful of members, just check their boxes and click Add to register them.
If you want to add ALL community members at once, simply check the Select and register all community members for this event box above the list, and then click Add to register them.

TIP: If you're retroactively adding someone for tracking purposes or adding someone who unexpectedly attended an event without registering, check the Mark registrants as attended box to mark them as attended in the system.

The registrant(s) will receive an email confirmation of their completed registration, along with the event’s details for their records. If it's a Full Registration event (i.e., it has sessions and/or registration choices), this feature will register the user for the event, but they'll still need to choose their sessions/choices via their My Registration’s event itinerary.

NOTE: If the event in question involves money: By default, registrants added this way are considered complete but not paid; however, if the user has paid on-site, an admin can mark the user as paid via the itinerary.

To learn more about the Registrant Roster, including how to use the other add registrant options, see Registrant Roster.

NOTE: The updates below are scheduled for release on July 31, 2019.

New Discussion Reports

Four new discussion reports will be available, which will provide more information about unanswered and answered threads, discussions that haven't had a reply marked as a best answer, and discussion-contributor activity. With this information, admins can act to ensure that threads needing replies get them and that contributors answering questions get recognized. We will continue working to improve upon reports and plan to surface additional metrics in future iterations.

These reports will be available under the Discussions section of reports in Admin:

Discussion Contributors Activity – This contributor-centric report provides details on users who have created discussions and contributed replies. You'll see data on how many of each they have posted, how many of their discussions have replies, how many of their discussions have best answers, and how many of their replies on other threads have been selected as best answers.
All Discussions Answer Activity – This report is community-based and provides aggregate data for each community's discussion activity, such as the percentage of discussions with a best answer, the average time to response, and average time to best answer.
Unanswered Discussions - View this report to see data about each of your community discussions that do not have any replies marked as "best answer". The report includes the total number of subscribers and followers, as well as the number of views for each discussion thread.
Answered Discussion Activity - This report provides metrics on discussions that have response activity, such as who posted a discussion, which response was selected as the best answer, and who provided the best answer. When filtering by date range for this report, discussions are included based on Original Post date. This report also includes the number of views for each discussion thread.

Event Manager enhancement

NOTE: The updates below are scheduled for release on July 31, 2019.

A new option is available for full registration events enabling your organization to capture more information about its registrants.

When creating or updating a full registration event, you can enable the "Additional Details" option to include up to 10 customizable fields on the registration form; you can even control whether registrants are required to fill them out. The values that registrants provide in these fields will display as a comma-separated list in the Additional Details column under Reports > Registrants.

Daily Digest Announcements

NOTE: The updates below were released on July 10, 2019.

Do you want to another vehicle to spread the word about upcoming organizational news, events, webinars, etc.? In addition to all the other community tools at your disposal, you can now include announcements in daily digest emails.

NOTE: This feature is disabled by default. Review the appropriate section below to learn how to enable this feature.

Enable in current admin interface

Click Admin in the Webmaster Links menu.
Click Admin.

Navigate to Communities > Digest Configuration > Discussion Template.

In the Digest Specific area, toggle the Include Announcements option to ON. You can even set title and text maximum character limits if you need to ensure announcements are concise.

Enable in New Admin Experience

Access the Admin interface.
Navigate to Email > Discussions > Digest Templates.

In the Daily Digest area, check the Include Announcements box. You can even set title and text maximum character limits if you need to ensure announcements are concise.

How does it work?

Once enabled, announcements are pulled from the Announcement List widget for each community.

All announcements posted the previous day will be included in the Daily Digest the next day for that community.

If you only post one new announcement, it will be the only one included in the Daily Digest.
If you post multiple announcements in a single day, they'll be displayed in the digest in the order they were posted.

Profile update - View Followed Content

You can manually follow discussion posts, blog articles, library uploads, and ideation submissions by navigating to them and clicking the Follow (star) icon.

This enables real-time participation emails for this specific content so that you'll be notified when your peers engage with it.

NOTE: See Real-time Participation Emails to learn more.

Now, to make it easier to track all the content you're following, you can view it from your profile; just navigate to My Connections > Following.

For each entry of followed content, you can click its links to:

view its content page,
view the content contributor's profile,
access the content landing page where the content item is located, and
review the date and time you followed the content item.

Filter followed content

By default, ALL followed content will display, but if you want to filter to a specific type of content, simply select it from the available menu.

Schedule Blog & Discussion posts

In addition to saving content as a draft, you can now schedule discussion posts and blog articles for publishing at a future date; this is ideal for creating content in advance and ensuring it's published according to a planned schedule, like when you need to drop new content on a weekly or monthly rhythm.

To schedule a post or article, click the Schedule button at the bottom of the blog or message editor. Then, choose the desired date, and click the clock icon at the bottom of the calender to choose a specific time.

How do I access my scheduled content?

From your profile, select List of Contributions from the My Contributions menu. Here, you'll see your published content, auto-saved drafts, and manually saved drafts.

To view only your scheduled content, select View scheduled items from the filter menu.

To edit scheduled content, click its title to continue writing.

Can I modify my scheduled content?

You can modify scheduled blogs and discussion posts in the following ways.

Edit - Scheduled content can be modified up until its scheduled publish date and time. Simply edit the content and click Save.
Reschedule - Prior to its release, you can edit scheduled content and click Reschedule to choose a new scheduled publish date and time.
Convert to draft - You can edit scheduled content and click Convert to Draft to unschedule the content and convert it to a draft.
Delete - If you edit a scheduled post or article and click Delete, the scheduled content (once confirmed) is deleted (no copy of the content is saved).

Discussion Nomenclature & Functionality updates

Reply replaces Reply Inline
Reply to Discussion has been removed (the new Reply option replaces this function)
Reply Privately replaces Reply to Sender

There are now two ways to reply to a post from a discussion:

1 - Reply to the entire Discussion

Click Reply to post your response inline to the entire discussion group. This will likely be your default response method much of the time to ensure the entire community can view it and engage with you.

When replying this way, you'll use the Basic editor, with a limited set of options. Click the ellipsis (...) button to expand the Basic Plus editor with additional formatting options.

2 - Reply only to poster

Select Reply Privately from the menu to respond only to the post's author. This is a great way to keep your response hidden from the rest of the community and only reply to the author of the post.

NOTE: You can't reply privately if the author posted anonymously.

Content Editor updates

The Content Editor is the editor you'll use to manage much of the content across your Higher Logic site; it's what you use when you post to a discussion, write a blog article, and post a comment, to name just a few.

With this update, the Content Editor now comes in three versions (Basic, Basic Plus, and Advanced). The version you'll see depends on what you're doing in the product. For example, you'll use the Basic editor when posting a comment to a blog article or library entry, but you'll use the Advanced editor when creating a CMS page or library entry.

Each version provides a different set of options, with Basic having a more limited set and Advanced including them all. This is done to streamline editor usage for the task at hand (i.e., hiding options to reduce clutter and complexity when not needed and showing them when it is).

Editor version overview

Let's take a closer look at each editor:

Basic

The Basic editor provides a minimal number of options, ideal for simple tasks like adding comments or posting to a discussion.

TIP: If additional functionality is needed, you can expand the Basic editor to the Basic Plus editor via the ellipsis (...) button. Click again to collapse back to Basic.

Basic Plus

Basic Plus provides additional paragraph options, like alignment and indentation, as well as various text-formatting styles (mostly headings) in the left-most menu.

In some cases, you'll use the Basic Plus editor by default; in others, you'll begin with the Basic editor but can expand to Basic Plus via the ellipsis (...) button.

Advanced

As you'd expect, the Advanced editor provides all available options.

The notable additions are the ability to:

access the HTML (or Source Code) editor,
embed videos from Vimeo and YouTube, and
use a wider array of text-formatting options in the Styles menu above the editor.

Notable changes

There are two main changes to the editor:

@mentions and #hashtags

Use these buttons (or type them directly in the editor) to initiate the @mention and #hashtag creation process.

See @Mentions to learn more about @mentions
See Tags to learn more about #hashtags

Inserting an image

There are two ways to insert an image:

Click Insert/edit Image, followed by Upload Image in the dialog, to browse for an image file from your device, network, or one of the many third-party options, like Facebook, Google Photos, etc.

NEW - You can now drag-and-drop an image from your device directly into the Basic, Basic Plus, and Advanced Editor.

If you're uploading a large image and don't want to display it as such, you can reduce its size (100px, 200px, 300px, or 400px wide) via the Image Display Settings menu. On the other hand, if you want to display the image per its original dimensions, select the Original Image option.

NOTE: In discussion posts, inserting an image using one of the 100px, 200px, 300px, or 400px wide Image Display Settings options enables you to create an expandable thumbnail.

What's New in Online Community?