Stay Connected, Organized, and Engaged: What’s New in Customer Communities

Great communities are dynamic spaces where conversations thrive, ideas flow, and solutions come together. Our latest release includes new features and enhancements that are designed to strengthen how your community connects and discovers content making it easier for you to cultivate this dynamic space.

Let’s take a closer look at each feature & enhancement:

Notification Center

Never miss a beat with the new Notification Center, designed to keep your community members informed in real-time. Accessible directly from the navigation bar, users will receive updates on replies, mentions, and new activity. This enhancement helps drive engagement by keeping users actively participating in discussions and responding to important conversations, improving the overall community experience.

Hierarchy in Product Areas

Organizing content across multiple products just got easier. With the new 2-level hierarchy for product areas, community managers can categorize Ideas and Product Updates under both products and their associated features. This structure simplifies navigation for your users, allowing them to filter and find relevant content faster. 
To make idea submissions even smarter, you can now require users to tag ideas with a product area, ensuring every submission is properly categorized—saving you valuable time and keeping your community organized.

User Interface Refresh

We’ve given your community a sleek, modern refresh to make navigating and engaging even easier. The refresh includes:

• Read/Unread Visual Indicators: Unread topics and replies now stand out in bold, helping users focus on new content.
• Build Bar UI Updates: A modern design has been introduced for a consistent, professional feel across the platform.
• Simplified Customization: The “Customize” button is now renamed to “Edit Layout,” making the entry point to customization mode clearer.

​​​​​​Smarter Spam Prevention

Protect your community’s integrity with smarter, more robust spam prevention tools. We’ve improved our integration with Akismet to include:

• Contextual Intelligence: Tags from parent topics are now sent to Akismet, ensuring replies align with the context (e.g., cooking tags vs. unrelated spam topics like software).
• Accurate User Agent Identification: Submissions now include the actual user’s browser information instead of internal system data for better spam classification.
• Enhanced Detection with Post Titles: Titles are now included in Akismet submissions, providing a more complete context for spam evaluation.
• Privacy-Compliant Spam Reporting: IP addresses and email data for manually marked spam are now hashed, improving data privacy and detection accuracy.

Zero Reply Filter in the Dynamic Content Widget

Help ensure no question goes unanswered with the new Zero Reply filter in the Dynamic Content Widget. This enhancement makes it simple for community managers and moderators to identify unanswered posts and prioritize follow-ups. By addressing unanswered questions faster, you’ll drive engagement, improve user satisfaction, and foster stronger community participation.

Related Ideas Closed:

Undo ‘Best Answer’ Solution in the Front End

We all make mistakes, and now you can fix them instantly. With this enhancement, community managers and moderators can undo a “Best Answer” designation directly from the front end. Whether it’s correcting an accidental click or updating a solution, this feature gives you the flexibility to maintain accurate and helpful responses for your community.

Related Idea Closed:

We hope these updates make managing and engaging in your community simpler and more effective. Have feedback or questions? Let us know in the comments below!