Some help is not for everyone: pricing for partners, setup guides for paying customers, internal runbooks. Formspring lets you decide who reads each collection.
Who can read a collection
Open Customer access on the Knowledge base page. Each collection has an Audience:
| Audience | Who can read it |
|---|---|
| Public | Anyone |
| Signed-in customers | Any customer your website has signed in to the help widget, or who has a valid access link |
| Customer groups only | Only customers in the groups you attach. With no group attached, nobody outside your team |
| Team only | Your team |
A collection can only narrow what its articles allow. A public article in a customer-only collection is customer-only. A team-only article stays team-only everywhere. If you delete a collection, its articles keep the audience it had, so nothing becomes public by accident.
Customer groups
A group is a set of customers, such as "Gold partners". A customer belongs to it by:
- a verified email address,
- an email domain (everyone at
acme.example), - their own customer ID from your system, or
- a group key named in the signed identity your server gives the help widget.
Remove a member or delete a group and the access ends on that customer's next request.
Signed identity for the help widget
Your server signs a short-lived identity token for the signed-in visitor, as described for the help widget. Besides sub and email, it may carry groups: a list of up to 20 group keys. Only groups that exist in your help center count, and they count only while the token is valid, at most a day. To end access sooner, remove the customer from the group in Formspring.
Access links
For customers who do not use the widget, create an access link. Give it a label, an optional group or email, and the number of days it works (up to 365).
- The link is shown once, when you create it. Copy it then.
- It opens your customer-only collections on the help center without a sign-in.
- It stops working when it expires, or the moment you revoke it.
- Anyone who has the link can use it, so send it only to the customer it is for.
Pages shown through an access link are never cached by shared caches and are never indexed by search engines.
Search engines and the sitemap
- Customer-only and team-only pages are never listed in the sitemap and never indexed.
- Hide a single article from search engines in its editor, or a whole collection under Customer access.
- Turn the sitemap off under Customize, Search engines.
Agents and the API
Everything here is available to coding agents and over the REST API: list_knowledge_customer_groups, create_knowledge_customer_group, add_knowledge_group_member, set_knowledge_collection_access, create_knowledge_access_link, revoke_knowledge_access_link and the rest. Creating a link returns its address once; it can never be read again.