May 2026
The May 2026 release is one of the most expansive updates of the year, delivering new tools for audience engagement, a significant expansion of moderation infrastructure, and a focused set of privacy and compliance fixes.
Publishers can now deploy polls as fully standalone widgets, and social login via Facebook and Google has moved to AWS Cognito for improved reliability. On the moderation side, the tag taxonomy used across the Console has been updated and expanded with more precise categories.
The release also resolves a range of bugs spanning in-widget notifications, the admin Console, Live Q&A moderation status, and several TCF consent and cross-site tracking issues.
New Features
- Standalone Poll Widget: Polls can now be created and deployed as fully standalone widgets, independent of the comment section. A new setup wizard guides you through configuration and embedding.
- Social Login via AWS Cognito (Facebook & Google): Social login with Facebook and Google has been migrated to AWS Cognito, improving reliability and long-term stability. No changes are required on your end.
- Comment-Only Reviews: Readers can now submit a review with written feedback only, without being required to select a star rating. This gives publishers more flexibility in how reviews are collected.
- Live Q&A on iOS SDK: Bring real-time, moderated Q&A sessions directly into your native iOS application. This integration supports full live-chat functionalities, including real-time user questions, replies, and host interactions without requiring manual refreshes, ensuring a seamless, highly engaging mobile experience for your audience.
Improvements
- Configurable Live Q&A Widget Title: The title displayed in the Live Q&A widget can now be customized per placement, giving you more control over how it appears on your site.
- Image Upload Toggle per Container: Image uploads in the comment section can now be enabled or disabled at the container level, rather than as a single site-wide setting.
- Translation Updates: Translation strings across all supported languages have been refreshed and resynced with the latest content.
- Duplicate Script Warning: If Viafoura scripts are loaded more than once on a page, a warning is now logged to the browser console to help publishers catch implementation errors earlier.
Moderation
Updated and Expanded Moderation Tags
The moderation tags used to label content in the Console have been updated and expanded to support automated moderation. Several existing tags have been renamed for clarity:
| Previous Name | New Name |
| Hate Speech | Discrimination |
| Personal Attack | Harassment |
| Misinformation | Unverified Claims |
| Contact Info | Privacy |
| Vulgar | Profanity |
| Spam | Commercial Content |
| Repeated | Repetitive Content |
| Suspicious Activity | Inauthentic Behavior |
Five new tags are also now available: External Links, Illegal Content, Impersonation, Sexual Content, and Threats.
These are name changes only — content tagged under the previous labels keeps its tags and will simply appear under the new names, so no action is required. The expanded, more granular tag set gives publishers clearer and more consistent violation categories as transparency and regulatory reporting requirements continue to evolve.
Bug Fixes
- Fixed an issue causing in-widget tray notifications to be significantly delayed in reaching users.
- Resolved an issue that was causing the Console workspace to return errors for multiple users simultaneously.
- Fixed a bug where moderation actions (such as approving or rejecting a post in Live Q&A) were not returning the correct status back to the author.
- Fixed an admin setting for “Show Ads on Empty Widget” that was not behaving as expected when the widget had no content to display.
- Fixed a visual bug where the reply button would jump position after liking or disliking a comment that had replies.
Privacy & Compliance
- TCF: Analytics Pre-Consent Firing Fixed: Fixed a bug where analytics events were being fired before a user had given consent on TCF-enabled sites. This affected the view_lite event and deferred consent flows.
- TCF: Cookie Persistence After Consent Revocation: Fixed a bug where _vfa, _vfb, and _vfz cookies could persist after a user revoked consent due to a stale consent state.
- Reduced Cross-Site Tracking Footprint: Removed a set of cross-site tracking behaviours to improve compatibility with tracker blocklists, including Disconnect and Firefox Enhanced Tracking Protection. Credentials are no longer sent on widget API requests.
- IAB TCF Device Storage Compliance: Completed required updates to meet the IAB TCF May 31st deadline for deviceStorage.json compliance, including cache-control and CORS header corrections.