Add a Khoros Community source

This is for:

Developer System Administrator

A Khoros Community source is an interactive community that enables users to share digital customer experiences on the Khoros platform. Members of a Coveo organization with the required privileges can add the source to index the content of their Khoros Community instance.

Source key characteristics

The following table presents the main characteristics of a Khoros Community source.

Features Supported Additional information

Khoros Community version

Latest version

Indexable content

Communities, categories, boards, and discussions (also known as threads and conversations) including topics (texts and products), replies (answers, comments, and reviews), messages (also known as posts), and message attachments.

Content update operations

refresh

check

Takes place every hour by default.

A rescan or rebuild is required to take account of deleted or modified items.

rescan

check

Takes place every day by default.

rebuild

check

Content security options

Same users and groups as in your content system

check

See "Content security" tab.

Specific users and groups

check

Everyone

check

Metadata indexing for search

Automatic mapping of metadata to fields that have the same name

This setting is disabled by default and not recommended for this source type.

Automatically indexed metadata

Examples of auto-populated default fields (no user-defined metadata required):
 

  • clickableuri

  • language (auto-detected from item content)

  • lithreadhassolution

  • lithreadmessagecount

  • litopicrating

  • limessageauthor

  • objecttype

  • title
     

After a content update, inspect your item field values in the Content Browser.

Extracted but not indexed metadata

The Khoros Community source extracts some of the metadata that the Khoros API makes available.
 

After a rebuild, review the View and map metadata subpage for the list of indexed metadata, and index additional metadata.
Tip
Leading practice

The number of items that a source processes per hour (crawling speed) depends on various factors, such as network bandwidth and source configuration. See About crawling speed for information on what can impact crawling speed, as well as possible solutions.

Add a Khoros Community source

Tip
Leading practice

It’s best to create or edit your source in your sandbox organization first. Once you’ve confirmed that it indexes the desired content, you can copy your source configuration to your production organization, either with a snapshot or manually.

See About non-production organizations for more information and best practices regarding sandbox organizations.

  1. On the Sources (platform-ca | platform-eu | platform-au) page, click Add source, and then select Khoros Community.

  2. Enter a Name for your source.

    Tip
    Leading practice

    A source name can’t be modified once it’s saved, therefore be sure to use a short and descriptive name, using letters, numbers, hyphens (-), and underscores (_). Avoid spaces and other special characters.

  3. Enter a Khoros Community address. To index an entire community, enter its root URL. To index only a part of a community, you can enter specific object addresses.

  4. Under Authentication, select whether Coveo must log in to access your community. If your community is private, select Khoros Community account and enter the credentials of a crawling account for the source. This account must:

    • Be a native Khoros Community account.

    • Be an administrator account if you plan on replicating your Khoros Community permission system in Coveo-powered search interfaces.

    • Be dedicated to the source.

    • Have access to all the content you want to index.

    • Have permission to make REST API read calls for all boards and categories of your community. When you have administrator rights, this setting is available in your Khoros Community Admin section, under Users tab > Permissions navigation bar section > Defaults tab > Make REST API calls with read access.

  5. Back in the Coveo Administration Console, enter the username and password of the source account.

  6. Optionally, under Project, select the project you want to associate your source with.

  7. Click Next.

  8. Select who will be able to access the source items through a Coveo-powered search interface. For details on this parameter, see Content security.

    If you select "Same users and groups as in your content system"

    If you want to replicate your Khoros community’s permission system in your Coveo-powered search interface, enter the username of a newly created Khoros user under Permission account. This account will be used by Coveo to discover your permission system, so it must be dedicated to this purpose. It can’t be the administrator account required to index a private community.

    See Permission indexing limitations for more information.

  9. Click Add source.

  10. Specify your source settings. Refer to the following sections for detailed information on the source settings:

"Configuration" tab

The Configuration tab lets you manage the content to index, authentication methods, and advanced settings of your source. These configuration groups are presented in subtabs.

"Content to index" subtab

The Content to index subtab lets you define the content that you want to make available as search results.

By default, Coveo indexes the community or content it finds at the URL you provided when creating the source.

Additional content

Optionally, select additional content to index: message attachments, user data, and/or message tags.

Important

Indexing attachments, users, and/or message tags, especially with large Khoros communities, can significantly increase the indexing time, as it requires an additional API call to Khoros per message/user.
Notes

  • You can include users only when indexing an entire community. If you only index a community subset such as a category or a board, users aren’t included.

  • The Khoros Community source populates three fields for message item folding: @foldingcollection, @foldingparent, and @foldingchild. Other item types such as attachments don’t have the folding field set and therefore can’t be folded. Instead, these items appear as a single result in the search interface.

"Authentication" subtab

The Authentication subtab contains the information Coveo needs to access your Khoros Community content.

Khoros Community address

Enter the address of the content you want to index. You can index an entire Khoros community by entering the root URL of the community. The URL should look as follows: http://community.company.com/.

You can also enter the address of a desired category, board, or thread. The address should be in the following format: http://community.company.com/[...]/<KHOROS-OBJECT-LABEL>/<OBJECT-ID>. Check the table below for the possible values for <KHOROS-OBJECT-LABEL>:

Possible values for a Khoros Community object label
Label Khoros Community object

ct-p

Category

tkbc-p

Knowledge base category

bd-p

Forum

tkb-p

Knowledge base

con-p

Contest

idb-p

Idea board

qa-p

Q&A board

bg-p

Blog

gp-p

Group

m-p

Forum thread

td-p

Forum thread

ta-p

Knowledge base article

cns-p

Contest submission

idi-p

Idea

qaq-p

Q&A Question

ba-p

Blog article

gpm-p

Group article
Notes
Authentication

If your Khoros Community is public, that is, accessible without logging in, select No login.

If your community is private, select Khoros Community account and enter the credentials of a crawling account for the source. This account must:

  • Be a native Khoros Community account.

  • Be an administrator account if you plan on replicating your Khoros Community permission system in Coveo-powered search interfaces.

  • Be dedicated to the source.

  • Have access to all the content you want to index.

  • Have permission to make REST API read calls for all boards and categories of your community. When you have administrator rights, this setting is available in your Khoros Community Admin section, under Users tab > Permissions navigation bar section > Defaults tab > Make REST API calls with read access.

See Source credentials leading practices for more information on crawling accounts.

Notes

  • Some Khoros communities contain public and private items. Private items are only accessible to users allowed to view this content. If you have such a community, enter the credentials of an account that is allowed to access all private content. If it isn’t, private items won’t be indexed. See Permission indexing limitations for more information.

  • If the crawling account doesn’t have the permission to make REST API read calls for certain boards and categories, they’re skipped during the indexing process and therefore won’t show up in a Coveo-powered search page. Moreover, if your source Community URL is the address of such a board or category, Coveo returns a KHOROS_COMMUNITY_AUTHORIZATION_ERROR error.

  • When your Khoros Community is secured using a basic authentication, you must provide your basic authentication credentials in the source JSON configuration.

  • SSO credentials aren’t supported. You must use a native Khoros account.

"Identification" subtab

The Identification subtab contains general information about the source.

Use the Project selector to associate your source with one or more Coveo projects.

"Items" tab

On the Items tab, you can specify how the source handles items based on their file type or content type.

File types

File types let you define how the source handles items based on their file extension or content type. For each file type, you can specify whether to index the item content and metadata, only the item metadata, or neither.

You should fine-tune the file type configurations with the objective of indexing only the content that’s relevant to your users.

Example

Your repository contains .pdf files, but you don’t want them to appear in search results. You click Extensions and then, for the .pdf extension, you change the Default action and Action on error values to Ignore item.

For more details about this feature, see File type handling.

Content and images

If you want Coveo to extract text from image files or PDF files containing images, enable the appropriate option. The extracted text is processed as item data, meaning that it’s fully searchable and will appear in the item Quick view.

Note

When OCR is enabled, ensure the source’s relevant file type configurations index the item content. Indexing the item’s metadata only or ignoring the item will prevent OCR from being applied.

See Enable optical character recognition for details on this feature.

"Content security" tab

Select who will be able to access the source items through a Coveo-powered search interface. For details on the content security options, see Content security.

If you select "Same users and groups as in your content system"

If you want to replicate your Khoros community’s permission system in your Coveo-powered search interface, enter the username of a newly created Khoros user under Permission account. This account will be used by Coveo to discover your permission system, so it must be dedicated to this purpose. It can’t be the administrator account required to index a private community.

See Permission indexing limitations for more information.

"Access" tab

On the Access tab, specify whether each group (and API key, if applicable) in your Coveo organization can view or edit the current source.

For example, when creating a new source, you could decide that members of Group A can edit its configuration, while Group B can only view it.

For more information, see Custom access level.

Build the source

  1. Finish adding or editing your source:

    • When you’re done editing the source and want to make your changes effective, click Add and build source/Save and rebuild source.

    • When you want to save your source configuration changes without starting a build/rebuild, such as when you know you want to make other changes soon, click Add source/Save. On the Sources (platform-ca | platform-eu | platform-au) page, click Launch build or Start required rebuild when you’re ready to make your changes effective and index your content.

  2. On the Sources (platform-ca | platform-eu | platform-au) page, follow the progress of your source addition or modification.

  3. Once the source is built or rebuilt, review its content in the Content Browser.

Index metadata

To use metadata values in search interface facets or result templates, the metadata must be mapped to fields. Coveo automatically maps only a subset of the metadata it extracts. You must map any additional metadata to fields manually.

Note

Not clear on the purpose of indexing metadata? Watch this video.

  1. On the Sources (platform-ca | platform-eu | platform-au) page, click your source, and then click More > View and map metadata in the Action bar.

  2. Review the default metadata that your source is extracting from your content.

  3. Map any currently not indexed metadata that you want to use in facets or result templates to fields.

    1. Click the metadata and then, at the top right, click Add to Index.

    2. In the Apply a mapping on all item types of a source panel, select the field you want to map the metadata to, or add a new field if none of the existing fields are appropriate.

      Note

      For advanced mapping configurations, like applying a mapping to a specific item type, see Manage mappings.

    3. Click Apply mapping.

  4. Return to the Sources (platform-ca | platform-eu | platform-au) page.

  5. To reindex your source with your new mappings, click your source, and then click More > Rebuild in the Action bar.

  6. Once the source is rebuilt, review your item field values. They should now include the values of the metadata you selected to index.

    1. On the Sources (platform-ca | platform-eu | platform-au) page, click your source, and then click More > Open in Content Browser in the Action bar.

    2. Select the card of the item for which you want to inspect properties, and then click Properties in the Action bar.

    3. In the panel that appears, select the Fields tab.

Refine the content to index

You may want to avoid indexing certain communities, or to index only a few of them. To do so:

  1. If not already done, create and save your source with a broad community URL.

  2. In your source JSON configuration, enter an address filter to refine the targeted content.

    Important

    Your community URL must match one of your inclusion addressPatterns and not match any of your exclusion addressPatterns.

  3. Build or rebuild your source.

Examples

  • With the following filter, Coveo doesn’t index the board whose ID is PrivateBoard.

    
  "AddressPatterns": [
  {
      "Allowed": false,
      "Expression": ".*board:PrivateBoard\/.*",
      "PatternType": "RegEx"
  }
  ],

  • With the following filter, Coveo doesn’t index categories whose ID contains Private, private, Moderator, moderator, Archive, or archive.

    
  "AddressPatterns": [
  {
      "Allowed": false,
      "Expression": ".*category:([Pp]rivate|[Mm]oderator|[Aa]rchive).*",
      "PatternType": "RegEx"
  }
  ],

Permission indexing limitations

When you replicate your community’s permission system in your Coveo-powered search interface, the interface end users only see the Khoros content they’re allowed to see in your Khoros community. Their Khoros-related search results vary based on the roles they’ve been assigned in Khoros Community. However, this option has some limitations regarding the following:

User privacy settings

Khoros Community user data includes private information such as user full names and email addresses. Privacy settings (My settings > Preferences > Privacy Settings) lets users choose who can see their private information on their profile. Options are: "All", "Friends only", and "No one", which is the default option. When "No one" is selected, the user’s private information is visible to administrators only.

If you decide to index Khoros Community user data, Coveo will crawl user information, including private data. However, since Coveo doesn’t support user privacy settings, it handles user private information as regular data. As a result, depending on your mapping rules, user private information could be available to anyone who can see your Khoros Community content in their search results.

If you want user private information to appear in your Coveo-powered search interface, create mapping rules for fields containing sensitive information such as email and fullname.

If don’t want user private information to appear in your Coveo-powered search interface, ignore these fields. As a result, Coveo will crawl the private information in the sensitive fields, but won’t index it due to the lack of mapping rule.

Restriction roles on public boards

Public Khoros boards are accessible to all users, including unauthenticated users. Khoros administrators can forbid users that have a certain role to access a certain public board. However, this doesn’t affect unauthenticated users. In other words, a user that has a role preventing them to see a certain public board could log out of Khoros and access this board. Since public boards are ultimately public, Coveo doesn’t replicate this behavior. When a board is public, any Coveo user that can access your search interface can also access the board’s content through it.

User-specific permissions

User-specific permissions (Users > Edit Users > Permissions) aren’t supported.

Khoros recommends setting permissions for roles, and then assigning roles to users, rather than using user permissions on a permanent basis.

Required privileges

You can assign privileges to allow access to specific tools in the Coveo Administration Console. The following table indicates the privileges required to view or edit elements of the Sources (platform-ca | platform-eu | platform-au) page and associated panels. See Manage privileges and Privilege reference for more information.

Note

The Edit all privilege isn’t required to create sources. When granting privileges for the Sources domain, you can grant a group or API key the View all or Custom access level, instead of Edit all, and then select the Can Create checkbox to allow users to create sources. See Can Create ability dependence for more information.
Actions Service Domain Required access level

View sources, view source update schedules, and subscribe to source notifications

Content

Fields

View

Sources

Organization

Organization

Edit sources, edit source update schedules, and edit source mappings

Organization

Organization

View

Content

Fields

Edit

Sources

View and map metadata

Content

Source metadata

View

Fields

Organization

Organization

Content

Sources

Edit

What’s next?