Embeddable with private knowledge base articles

Hey @Hannah Bailey ! Welcome back. :)

Unfortunately, it’s not really possible to do this, as having the embeddable widget show hidden topics is the equivalent of leaking them publicly. The way the widget currently works prevents any leaks. The only way you can use the widget properly is with topics that are accessible by anonymous users.

However, I can think of a middle ground here. It’s not currently supported as far as I’m aware, but a future enhancement could probably make it so that the widget shows content based on all existing factors as well as whether the user is currently able to access it based on login status and permissions.

As it just so happens, you’re not alone with this idea. It looks like @SmartlyGreg is also interested and he’s already created an idea post. Feel free to check this one out!

Hope this helps. :)

@Hannah Bailey there is a workaround, which I feel is really insufficient for our use of the embeddable widget but might be helpful for some cases:

If you publish the article within a category that is public it is selectable as we know, so if you do it while the content you select is still public Control will not stop you from featuring it in the embeddable widget. Making the category private after making it featured within the embeddable widget will not remove it. So it stays featured in the embeddable widget!

For us at Smartly.io this was a dealbreaker for the use of the widget altogether sadly! Sincerely hope the idea @Blastoise186 kindly pointed you to helps fix this!

Hope this helps!

@SmartlyGreg 
Thanks for workaround. It does show the article in the embeddable widget. But when the user clicks to see the content of the article within the embeddable it is blank. 

 

The embeddable was one of the reasons why we decided to go with Insided. Disappointed that the embeddable can not work the way it was described. 

@Hannah Bailey hmmm! I’m surprised about that coz I thing it was a tip given to me by @Julian if I remember correctly!?!? Perhaps he can weigh in…

There is a way to use the search API to re-create the widget but I agree I had very high hopes for the embeddable widget and there were a couple of things that made it sadly un-usable, hence the ideas I opened in relation, as shared previously:

But also:

And one I didn’t start myself but is equally critical to us:

Hope this helps!

So I also recently learned that, in this particular scenario, the content will not be listed to protect it from unwanted exposure. While I do understand that from your point of view this is not desired, others have to count on the widget to work like this so that e.g. content from their hidden Super User category cannot simply be accessed via the embeddable widget.

I do understand that additional functionality would help so that you can manually “whitelist” protected categories for the embeddable widget.

@SmartlyGreg I actually did not know about this workaround until now? :D Maybe you confused me with someone else, I don’t know...

@Julian not sure where I got it from then. 

But it would be more than whitelisting some pieces of content/ categories; in fact for us we would almost want the exact opposite behaviour as the embeddable widget has today: Displaying only the private categories, since the use of our widget would be inside our app (behind a login) only the content specific to customers will be relevant.

Makes me wonder why InSided doesn’t have an issue with this…I guess few categories are restricted to customers only and there is no point for ideation to be searchable from the widget… You can see how there is a thin line to cross before this becomes an issue though!

Thanks for elaborating on this. I do see your points, I assume that it is also a challenge for us as the use cases / context of using this widget differs a lot between customers, as this thread shows as well until a certain degree.

Of course “why-questions” are traditionally hard to answer in software development, I am not sure how my colleagues from engineering are looking at this specific topic.

A silver lining could be the info that Gainsight has a similar tool, which might play a role in our platform as well in the future. Currently this is merely something we see on the horizon, it will take some investigation and decision making to see if there is a possibility of us benefiting from functionality there. So I don’t expect much in this direction until Q3/Q4 earliest.

Hey all, maybe I can weigh in here quickly - so the way we implemented this for @SmartlyGreg was to temporarily make the KB public, add it to the embeddable and then make it private again. This obviously works for the curated content topics but unfortunately will not work for normal embeddable search + KB articles.