Frequently asked questions

Help Center customization

• How can I list all community posts on my Home page?

  To list all community posts on the Guide home page, you can use the Help Center API along with custom JavaScript. See Show list of all Posts on Home page using API for more information.

• Why do I receive a "Failed to prevew theme" error message?

  The Failed to preview theme error message is the result of outdated or incorrectly formatted code in your Help Center theme.

  To fix this issue

  1. Export your custom theme. Don’t deactivate the theme while exporting it.
  2. Fix the bad or corrupted code.
  3. Import the theme back into your Help Center.
• Can I edit the robots.txt file that my Zendesk subdomain is using?

  The robots.txt file is a shared file used by all Zendesk accounts. It is not account-specific and cannot be edited.

  Currently, the only option to block a page from being indexed is to add a meta tag to your Help Center.

  To temporarily exclude a specific page from being indexed by Google, see How do I exclude a Help Center page from being indexed by Google?.

• How do I change the date format to the actual date?
  1. In Guide admin, click the Customize design icon () in the sidebar.
  2. Select the theme you’d like to edit.
  3. Click Edit Code.
  4. Select the requests_page.hbs template.

  5. Change the timeago value for the date updated_at and date created_at placeholders to false, for example:

     <td>{{date updated_at timeago=false}}</td>

  See customizing your Help Center theme for information.

• How do I remove or modify the article author or date?

  The avatar, author, and date updated information is all located in the article-author div on the Article page.

  If you want to simply change the author of the article, see Changing the author for an article.

  To access this information follow these steps:

  1. Log into your Help Center and visit Guide Admin > Customize design icon ().
  2. In the Design editor, select view theme > edit code.
  3. In the Theme editor, access the article_page.hbs.
  4. In the default Copenhagen theme, you will find the following code, that contains all of the author information displayed in an article (including author name, avatar, etc). Simply remove this content or modify to display the information that you would like.
• How can I remove the Follow button on my Help Center articles?

  This is accomplished by removing the subscribe helper from the article page’s code.

  To remove the code snippet

  1. Within the Help Center, select Guide Admin > Customize design.
  2. One your live theme, select View theme.
  3. Click the options menu (), and select Edit code.
  4. From the templates, select article_page.hbs.
  5. Identify the subscribe helper and remove its reference and any associated wrapper.

  

Managing your knowledge base

• How can I restrict access to a category in my Help Center?

  You can restrict categories by restricting all of the articles of all the sections within the category. For details, see Restricting access to knowledge base content.

• Can I have just a Help Center?

  It is not possible to have a standalone Help Center at this time. The Help Center functionality is largely reliant on tools and settings only found in the Support portal.

• Can I see who voted on articles in my knowledge base?

  Although it is not natively possible to view which user voted on an article within your knowledge base, it is possible to obtain this data via the API. For more information on retrieving data for votes on articles, refer to the Help Center API.

• How can I copy my content from one Help Center to another?

  Unfortunately, there is no native way to copy articles from Help Center to another Help Center, regardless of if that Help Center is a separate brand or separate subdomain. Instead, a Guide administrator would need to manually copy each article and paste that article into the desired Help Center. Alternatively, a Guide administrator could create a custom script that utilizes the Help Center API to copy content over to a different Help Center.

• Can I create articles under Help Center categories?

  No, it is not possible to create articles directly within categories. Articles can only be placed within a section (or subsection if you have Flexible Hierarchies), and sections within categories.

  As a workaround, create only one category and restructure your FAQs to have multiple sections inside that single category. Help Center will display the sections in the Home page if there is only one category where all the sections reside in. For more information on this, see Getting started with Guide: Setting up.

• How do I add subsections to a section page?

  If you are in the Zendesk Guide Enterprise plan, you can add sections within sections in your Help Center. You can create a nest of up to 5 subsections.

  For instructions on how to add a subsection to a section, see Adding a subsection to a section.

Working with articles

• Why is an article's appearance different in the editor than in Help Center?

  The Help Center editor is not a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor. The editor is, instead, a WYSIWYM (what you see is what you mean) editor. Because of this, the styling of articles while editing, will generally be different from how it looks when published. The reasoning behind this decision is that content structure and presentation is completely split and that styling options are not done in the editor. Instead all styling options are done in the Help Center CSS which is then applied to the content upon publishing. This is the same principle that you find when working with Markdown, the intent versus the finished product.

  Therefore the goal of the article editor is not to exactly show how it will look once published, but rather to allow you to build up the content that you then apply styles to afterwards. This ensures consistency across articles, as opposed to using inline styles, which would be difficult to change at a later stage and generally not recommended for web design.

  The differences in editor versus published appearance is common when adding tables to Help Center articles.

• How do I update Help Center articles via API?

  The Help Center Update article API endpoints only allow you to update article metadata. These endpoints update article-level metadata such as its promotion status or sorting position. The endpoints do not update translation properties such as the article’s title, body, or draft.

  You will want to use our Translations endpoint to make updates to existing articles’ body content.

• Does Zendesk have a document storage feature?

  No, at this time Zendesk Support does not include a document storage tool. Additionally, file attachment sizes are limited in tickets, Help Center assets and articles.

• Can users be notified when new articles are published?

  Users can subscribe to sections to be notified of new articles published in that section by clicking Follow. They can also follow individual articles to be notified of new comments on the article. Commenting on an article automatically subscribes a user to that article. For more information, see Help Center guide for end users.

  In addition, Admins can use the Subscriptions Help Center API endpoint to subscribe their users to sections or articles.

  For more related content, see the below articles:

  • How can I remove the Follow button on my Help Center articles?
  • Does promoting an article send a notification to users that follow it?
• Can I be notified when an article is submitted for review?

  There is not an option to automatically notify agents when articles are submitted for review. Our best practices include monitoring that queue when you are ready to review content. If you want to send an email notification, use the assigning articles feature.

  For more on Team Publishing, see this article: About Guide Team Publishing (Enterprise).

• Are Help Center URLs case sensitive?

  Yes. The URLs in your Help Center are case sensitive.

  All elements of a Help Center URL should be entered in lowercase. Otherwise, users will see an error message stating that the page they were looking for does not exist. Exception to this are the titles of your Categories, Sections, and Articles.

Answer Bot

• How should I structure articles for Answer Bot?

  An ideal article for Answer Bot has the following characteristics:

  • An article body focused on a single subject, like a question, with a succinct answer or solution
  • A specific title, written from your customers’ perspective
  • As much context as possible in the first 75 words of the article body

  For more information about how to structure your articles, see Optimizing your articles for Answer Bot.

• Will Answer Bot server articles in any variant of a language?

  Yes, Answer Bot does not discriminate between variants of a language. Furthermore, our language id model will also not discriminate between variants of a language. This means that the english article which best answers the question will be recommended. If there is only a British English version of an article, that article would be recommended for a user with US English as their profile language.

• How does Answer Bot detect the user's language?

  The user’s language detection depends on the Answer Bot experience:

  • Email - Answer Bot uses language detection machine learning model to detect language based on the subject and description.
  • Web form - Answer Bot uses the defined locale of the Help Center (e.g. /hc/en-us) which is currently being used and forces that locale/language when doing the article suggestion.
  • API, SDK, Web Widget - Answer Bot does the same language detection as email on the text inputted.
• Which user is assigned to the ticket when it's solved through Answer Bot?

  Answer Bot was built to bypass the agent required for solving tickets. If a ticket has no assignee, Answer Bot solves the ticket and it remains unassigned.

  For more information on Answer Bot, see our Answer Bot resources.

• Which part of a ticket is used to determine suggestions?

  Answer Bot uses the ticket’s subject and description (first ticket comment) to gather context and determine which articles to suggest.

  If you have Guide Professional or Enterprise, this behavior is slightly different in the Knowledge Capture app. In these instances, Answer Bot uses the most recent comment from the requester to suggest articles to agents. For more information on Answer Bot, see Answer Bot resources.

• What happens when an Answer Bot trial expires?

  When an Answer Bot trial ends, your triggers and configurations will not automatically be updated. However, without an active Answer Bot subscription, no articles will be suggested, even when the trigger fires as normal. This is also true when you use all of your Answer Bot resolutions in a given billing cycle.

  This means that your business rules won’t be affected by a lapse in your Answer Bot subscription. If you do not plan to move forward with an Answer Bot subscription, as a best practice, you’ll want to manually update your triggers to remove Answer Bot actions.

  For more information on Answer Bot triggers, see Creating and managing triggers for Answer Bot.

• Why do I see tickets with the requester set to Unknown?

  Tickets with Unknown (Answer Bot) as the requester are created when an end user’s question was answered by an article suggested by the Answer Bot from the Web Widget before a ticket was created. The user’s information was not captured because the Answer Bot via the Web Widget does not require identification before an interaction.

  For more information about using Answer Bot for Web Widget, see Configuring Answer Bot for the Web Widget.

• Why do I see results from an unsupported language?

  Answer Bot uses Guide search as a fallback when it cannot find matching criteria from the Answer Bot’s supported language.

  For more information about Answer Bot for the Web Widget, see the following articles:

  • Configuring Answer Bot for the Web Widget.
  • Enabling and using Answer Bot in the Web Widget.