Your help center is a public site for your published articles. It stays offline until you turn it on, and nothing you change on the design page goes public until you publish it.
Go live
At the top of the Knowledge base page, the status bar reads Help center is offline. Click Go live and it changes to Help center is live, with the address and the number of article views in the last 30 days. Open takes you to the site. Only articles that are published and set to Everyone - help center are shown.
You can also switch it on or off with Help center is live on the design page.
Choose the address
Your help center lives at formspring.io/help/your-address. Click Customize in the status bar, open Address & brand, and edit Address. It must be 3 to 64 characters of lowercase letters, numbers and dashes, and not already taken. A few names (such as help, support, docs and api) are reserved.
Changing the address changes every article link, so set it before you share the site.
Match your brand
The design page has a live preview that repaints as you change anything. Work through the tabs:
- Address & brand - Name, Address, Your website (adds a link back to your site), Logo image URL and Favicon URL. Without a logo it shows your initial on the accent colour.
- Colours - accent, page background, panels, text, secondary text, borders, article links, and header colours.
- Fonts & shape - heading and body fonts (your uploaded brand fonts appear first), corner roundness and content width.
- Layout - the style and alignment of the search area, topics as tiles or a list, and switches for popular articles, topic descriptions, article counts, updated dates, related articles and the "Did this answer your question?" vote.
- Text - every line of copy, from the headline and search placeholder to the vote buttons and contact form wording.
- Links - up to six header links and six footer links.
- Search engines - the page title and description, and Hide from search engines.
- Custom CSS - extra styling. For safety, imports, scripts and images from untrusted addresses are removed.
Click Publish changes to make your edits live, or Discard changes to go back to the last published version. Open live site shows the real thing.
Removing the "Powered by Formspring" line from the footer (Hide Formspring branding) needs a paid plan.
The contact form
Turn on Show the contact form under Address & brand to let readers write to you. A reader enters their email, a subject and a message. Their message opens a conversation in Desk, tagged help-center, assigned by your routing rules, and you answer by email.
While they type the subject, the form suggests the article most likely to answer, so some people never need to send. Messages are rate-limited and checked for bots. The "Still need help?" switch in Desk settings → Channels is the same setting, so you can turn it off from either place.
What readers see
The home page has a search box, optional popular articles, and your collections as topics. Articles show a table of contents for longer pieces, related articles from the same collection, and a "Did this answer your question?" vote. Their votes feed Article stats.