- Restricting your entire help center to signed-in users
only
You can prevent anonymous visitors from accessing your help center by requiring end users to sign in. This is known as a restricted help center. Visitors will only see the sign-in page.
- Setting view permissions that restrict signed-in users to a user
segment (this feature is not available on Suite Team)
You can define which of your help center users can have view access by setting the help center view permissions. The following options are available:
- Signed-in users This includes internal and external users who create an account and sign in to your help center.
- Agents and managers This option is for staff members only, so that you can create content that is internal-only.
- Custom user segment This option enables you to restrict viewing access to specific users based on tags, organizations, or groups by applying custom user segments (see Creating user segments to restrict access).
You can also restrict access to specific areas of your knowledge base (see Restricting access to knowledge base content) and community (see Restricting access to community content).
To restrict your help center visibility
- In Guide admin, click the Settings (
) icon in the sidebar.
- Under Security, select Require sign in.Note: If you are on an Employee Service plan, this option is not selectable. Your help center is restricted to signed-in users only.
- (Optional) If you want to restrict your help center visibility
to a segment, under Require sign in, select Limit to user
segment, then open the dropdown menu and select a
User segment. Note: Restricting visibility to a user segment is not available on Suite Team.
By default, the visibility of your help center is set to Signed in users.
- Click Update.
35 comments
Dave Dyson
Hi James, no worries, this is a fine place to put your question – and welcome to the community!
You definitely want to leave the option to sign in turned on in your help center settings. That won't affect articles that are set to be visible to Everyone. If you didn't allow people to sign in, there'd be no way for them to sign in and see the articles that require sign-in. Does that help clarify?
-1
Lauren Ward
Hi @... and others, I'm looking for some clarification around end user behavior if "require sign-in" is turned off. My Help Center uses SSO and is currently requiring sign-in. When I test disabling this setting, I see that a non-authenticated user is prompted to sign-in when browsing. However, when the non-authenticated user enters a search term, they're sent to the search results page with no results and no prompt to sign-in for more. Can you recommend how to address this? My goal is to not require sign-in for my Help Center in general, but require it for most articles. I understand I can set that up by disabling the general setting and setting the visibility of articles to Signed in users, but the problem is that search results for a non-authenticated make it seem like there are no related articles, even though there are. Any guidance is much appreciated.
0
Ariane Frances dela Cruz
Hi Lauren,
I'd like to dig deeper into the behaviour that your end-user is experiencing. I'll create a ticket for you, please expect an email shortly.
0
Jen Ma
Hi Dave,
I have a unique situation. I have over 5 brands in my Zendesk environment. The 5 brands are accessible to anyone. It is set up that way under the end-user general setting. Now I have two brands that I would like to set up restrictions for. I tried to set up these settings on the help center level, but when I try to submit a ticket, it said the ticket was submitted, but I also was directed to an error page. I am not sure what is going on. Do you have any advice for me? Thank you.
0
Cheeny Aban
Hi Jennifer,
Is your Help Center activated? Here's how you can activate your Help Center
0