Schedule
- Staging: Week of May 18
- Production: Week of May 25
- Enterprise: Week of June 1
Polls Support in Layout Editor Pages
Polls can now be used on Layout Editor pages, making it easier for communities to upgrade from legacy page experiences without losing important poll functionality.
Polls can now be used on Layout Editor pages, making it easier for communities to upgrade from legacy page experiences without losing important poll functionality.
Polls are now built in as a custom post type, which gives communities more flexibility in how polls are configured and displayed. For example, customers can add poll-specific fields, support anonymous poll behavior, and control where polls are available by limiting them to specific roles or categories.
With this update, customers using custom layouts can create and display polls more reliably while preserving the expected poll experience for members. This enhancement helps remove a key upgrade blocker for customers who rely on polls and want to take advantage of the flexibility of Layout Editor.
Bot Traffic Filtering for Analytics
Higher Logic Vanilla now includes application-level filtering for known bot traffic in page view analytics.
Previously, bot and crawler traffic could inflate guest page view reporting, making it harder for community teams to understand real human activity. With this release, known bot user agents can be identified through a maintained application-level manifest and separated from standard page view analytics.
Matched bot traffic is routed to a separate bot views collection instead of being counted in standard page views. This helps make guest page view reporting more accurate while still preserving bot traffic data for future analysis.
This update is especially useful for communities that rely on guest traffic trends to measure content reach, SEO performance, and community growth.
Shadow Banning Language Updates
The Troll Management terminology in the user profile moderation controls has been updated to use clearer Shadow Banning language.
The user profile options now refer to “Shadow Ban” and “Lift Shadow Ban” instead of “Mark as Troll” and “Unmark as Troll.” The profile notice shown for shadow banned users has also been updated to better explain what shadow banning means.
This change makes the moderation experience clearer and more aligned with the current feature name.
Scoped Moderation Notifications
Higher Logic Vanilla now supports moderation notifications for scoped moderators in the Community Management Dashboard.
Previously, moderation notifications were primarily tied to global moderation permissions. Category moderators, Group Owners, and Group Leaders could access moderation work within their assigned areas, but they did not receive proactive notifications when new Reports or Escalations required attention.
With this release, scoped moderators can opt in to email and/or popup notifications for:
- New Reports
- New Escalations
- Escalations assigned to them
Notifications are permission-based and record-scoped, so moderators only receive notifications for Reports and Escalations connected to the groups or categories they manage. This helps improve response times, reduce manual checking, and support more effective moderation delegation in larger or segmented communities.
There is no change to existing global moderation behavior.
Expanded Discussion Sorting Options for New Layouts
We’ve added more sorting options to discussion lists on new layouts, giving members easier ways to find the content most relevant to them.
New sorting options include:
- From Users I Follow
- My Posts
- Participated
- Bookmarked
These options make it easier for members to quickly return to conversations they care about, track their own activity, and discover updates from people they follow.
Early Adopter Feature: User Following
Community members can now follow other users so they can stay connected with the people whose contributions matter most to them.
User following helps members personalize their community experience around trusted, interesting, or expert contributors. When enabled, members can follow and unfollow users, receive notifications about new activity from followed users, and manage related notification preferences.
This feature supports stronger member-to-member relationships, helps surface valuable contributors, and encourages repeat engagement by making it easier for users to keep up with people they care about.
This feature is in beta with our advocates but will be generally available soon!