Setting your knowledge base to be fully public, entirely private, or a mixture of public and private is just the first step to determining who can access your content. Those are broad content controls.
For more fine-grained content controls, use reader groups.
Reader groups are groups you create to identify different groups of readers and/or content in your knowledge base.
You can then restrict content so that it's only visible to certain groups and not others, or even show different groups a different logo in your top navigation!
Reader group overview
If you have a content restricted to a particular reader group, members of that reader group will see it just like any other type of content. It will show up in the table of contents, in search results, in answers the AI chatbot generates, on category landing pages, and so on.
But if someone accessing your knowledge base isn't a member of the reader group, they can't find or interact with that content at all:
- The restricted article or category won't show in the table of contents
- The restricted article or category won't show on the homepage or category landing page
- The restricted article or category won't show up in typeahead search or full search results
- The restricted article or category won't be used in the AI chatbot's answers
- Even if that reader is given a direct link to the article or category, they'll receive a "You don't have access to this content" message rather than being able to view the page itself.
In short, for anyone who isn't a member of the reader group, it's as if that content doesn't exist at all.
You can also control whether using multiple groups on a piece of content should require membership in all groups or just membership in one group. Refer to Content with multiple reader groups for more information.
Ways to use reader groups
Here are just a few ways you can use reader groups:
- In knowledge bases combining some public content with some private content, add a reader group to your content to mark it as private and remove it from public view.
- For entirely private knowledge bases, use reader groups to share content only with specific readers and not others.
- Create a "KO Authors" or "Review" reader group to hide in-progress content from your general readership and make it available only to authors or members of the Review group.
In all scenarios, you can add reader groups to individual articles (restricts only that article to the groups) or to entire categories.
If you restrict an entire category to a reader group, all the articles and subcategories within that category inherit the reader group restrictions. This is a fast way to quickly segregate or wall off some content from readers.
Get started with reader groups
There are three basic steps to using reader groups:
- Create reader groups: Refer to Set up Reader Groups for instructions on creating reader groups.
- Assign readers to those reader groups: Set their Reader Group Access by creating/editing an individual reader, bulk-creating new readers, or bulk-editing existing readers.
- Restrict content to reader groups: Refer to Use Reader Groups in content for more detailed information.