Enable and configure comments

By default, your knowledge base will come with Comments enabled. If you need to re-enable comments in a knowledge base that's had them disabled--or if you want to learn more about the various settings available within comments--follow the instructions below!

To enable Comments in your knowledge base:

  1. Go to Settings > Comments
  2. Select the checkbox next to Enable comments to "Allow people to comment on articles."Settings > Comments screen
  3. Restrict commenters sets who can physically comment on your knowledge base; Restrict visibility sets who can see those comments. See Comment restrictions and permissions for more detail on each option.
  4. By default, all comments are set to require approval before they'll be displayed. If you'd prefer all comments be automatically approved (and displayed) as soon as they've been submitted, check the box next to Auto Approve.
  5. Comments are automatically shown in the Comments reporting dashboard. If you'd also like to send email notifications to particular address(es) when comments are submitted, check the box next to Email Notifications and add the email addresses you'd like to send to in the Email Recipientslist.
    • You can also choose to adjust the Email Reply To and Email From fields so that they aren't coming from Knowledge Support (support@knowledgeowl.com).
  6. Email notifications of new comments will default to an Email Frequencyof Every new comment. You can change this frequency to Hourly, Daily, or Weekly digests.
    You can customize all the text shown in the Comments section in Tools > Customize Text in the Article knowledge base section. Learn more.
  7. If Email Frequency is set to "Every new comment", the Reply to commenter option appears.
    1. When unchecked, comment notification emails will use the Email reply to field as the reply-to address.
    2. When checked, comment notification emails will use the commenter's own email as the reply-to address. This is a great setting to use if you're feeding comment notifications into a help ticketing/support desk system!
  8. Be sure to Save your changes.

If you're re-enabling comments in a knowledge base, you may need to re-add them to one of your Custom HTML templates to have them fully display. While you can add them anywhere, we recommend adding them either into the Article footer or the Right Column (if you're using it).

To add to the Article footer:

  1. Go to Settings > Style.
  2. Below the preview pane, be sure Custom HTML is selected.
  3. Select Article from the Custom HTML dropdown.
  4. Click the Select a Merge Code dropdown, find the Article Merge Codes section, and select Article Comments.

  5. Click to put your cursor where you want to add the comments section (in the hg-article-footer is a great place!) and click the Insert button to add the merge code. (You can always move the merge code around in the HTML to get it exactly where you want.) You can see where we put the comments section by default in Default Article HTML.
  6. You can Preview your changes (be sure you're looking at an Article in preview though!)
  7. Once you're satisfied with your changes, be sure to Save.

Your comments section is now live!

Adding comments into the right column is a similar process, but you may want to create a separate right-col-panel div to add it into--it depends on how your right column is laid out!