Visibility and permissions

You can hide a category from the table of contents, landing pages, article lists (certain categories only), and breadcrumbs. This can be useful for Sharing "draft" articles before making them publicly available, or having resources you only want to direct people to by URL.

To alter a category's display settings:

1. Open the category to edit it.
2. Select the display limitations you want from the Display Settings menu. Different category types have different restrictions options, and the options also vary depending on whether the category is a subcategory or top level category.
3. Select Save.

Display Settings options

This list describes all the possible display settings options and their behavior. The table below shows which settings are available to each category type.

• Exclude from search results: Users cannot find the category through the knowledge base search.
  • This setting will also remove the article from the Recommended tab of Contextual Help Widget (2.0) and from the Recommended section of Contextual Help Widget (Modern).
    
• Hide from table of contents: Category does not appear in the table of contents or the Contextual Help Widget (2.0) Knowledge tab
• Hide from homepage: Category is not listed on the homepage.
• Hide from category landing page: Category is not listed on the parent category's landing page.
• Hide from article lists: Category does not appear on the homepage or the Popular, New, and Updated article lists. This does not affect the Recent Articles List or Article Favorites.
  • This setting will also remove the article from the Recommended section of Contextual Help Widget (Modern).
• Remove "Download to PDF" icon: Prevent readers from downloading this category as a PDF.
• Remove feedback ability: Disable the ratings section in this category, even if they are enabled for the knowledge base overall.
• Remove comment ability: Disable the comments section in this category, even if they are enabled for the knowledge base overall.

Articles within these categories

Articles do not inherit category display settings. You may need to take more steps to fully hide a category and all its contents or to hide individual articles.

• Articles inside a hidden category (one that is hidden from the table of contents, category landing pages and so on), are still available in search. Refer to Exclude a category and all its content from search results for guidance on completely removing a category from search.
• If you want to hide articles inside a category, you can:
  • Mark individual articles as Hide from table of contents, Hide from category landing page, and Hide from article lists (and/or Exclude from search results). If you're trying to hide all articles in a category, you'd need to change this setting for all articles individually.
  • Create a reader group and restrict the category to this reader group (we often use a group called "Hidden" for these purposes!). This effectively hides the category and all its content from anyone who is not a member of that reader group. See How do reader groups work? for more information on working with reader groups.

Sometimes, you need to restrict content to certain groups of readers. For example, you may want some content in your knowledge base to only be available to people at your company, while wanting other sections to be public.

To restrict a category or subcategory to certain readers, refer to the instructions in the reader group documentation:

1. First, create a reader group. 
2. Then restrict the category to the reader group. When a category or subcategory is restricted to a reader group, only readers who are part of the group can access the category. 

Reader group restrictions are inherited by subcategories and articles, meaning that if you apply a reader group to a category, the same permissions also apply to any content inside the category. This means that if you want to restrict everything inside a category, you only need to set the reader group restrictions on the category, and KnowledgeOwl automatically applies the same restrictions to the content inside the category.

The Exclude category search setting lets you fully exclude a single category and all of its content from search results. When you use this option, it automatically excludes from search:

• The main category content, if it's a type indexed for search
• All subcategories, if they're indexed for search
• All articles directly within the category
• All articles within any of its subcategories

This can be especially useful if you have a category you never want to show up in search. For example, Linus has a category for Internal Reviews. He publishes in-progress work here to get subject matter experts' review, but has the category hidden from the table of contents and the homepage.

To exclude a category and all its content from search:

1. Go to KB settings > Search and synonyms. The Search and synonyms page opens to the General settings tab.
2. In the Reader controls section, under Exclude category, select the gear cog icon. The Exclude category from search modal opens.
3. Start entering the name of the category you wish to exclude. As you type, the modal autosuggests category titles.
4. Select the category you want to exclude, then select Exclude Category.
5. Once you've made your selection, be sure to Save your changes.

All of the content in that category is now excluded from search.

Why use this setting?

Search result exclusions are usually set in individual articles. They don't get passed from the category to the articles.

Excluding content from search in that piecemeal way can be inconsistent, since authors must remember to check the box in each article or add a reader group restriction.

If you always have one category that should never be indexed--like an internal review or in-progress or playground category--excluding it from search can give you full peace of mind that your in-progress or experimental work won't ever show up in your search results.