⚰️
RIP Community Help Center - Why we decided to sunset this feature
crowd.dev is saying goodbye to our Community Help Center feature.
As a dedicated team, we're constantly working to make our product the best it can be for you. That means we sometimes need to rethink our feature set and ensure we're giving you what you truly need.
That's why we've decided to sunset our Community Help Center feature. We originally designed it for our users to create a support hub through community-created content and messages. Additionally, we wanted to support your SEO efforts through indexable landing pages. We still stand by the idea behind Community Help Center, but that’s not enough to keep it.
We want to be transparent about our reasons behind this change:
Low adoption: The Community Help Center didn't catch on with many of our users (only 3% of all users ever tried it), and lasting retention was also not there.
Focused efforts: As a small team, we want to spend our limited time and resources on features that align with our vision and, most importantly, your requests, giving you the most value possible.
Simplicity rules: We're all about intuitive and straightforward design, so sometimes you need to clean house and remove features that might be more distracting than helpful.
If you were an avid user and fan of Community Help Center and just got really upset reading this - don’t worry! If that’s the case, we offer to support you in setting up something similar by yourself. All you have to do is reach out to us via [email protected].
As always, we're all ears when it comes to your thoughts and feedback. Please drop us a line if you have any questions, concerns, or ideas related to this decision or anything else on your mind regarding crowd.dev.
Thanks for your continued support!
Take care,
Jonathan & the crowd.dev team

crowd.dev automatically detects conversations that are going on in your community. On the one hand, this will help you to keep a better overview of discussed topics. What's even more exciting is that you can auto-generate a Community Help Center with our Community Help Center App.

With Community Help Center you can publish conversations with valuable support content to SEO-friendly landing pages. Information that would otherwise get lost and asked repeatedly will now be available and working for you as we:

Auto-generate support content
Make your community content discoverable by Google
Reduce duplicate questions and support effort

Take a look at this example, which is created based on our Discord community.

How to set-up

General set-up

To set up your community help center, simply navigate to the Comunity Help Center page.

Click Settings and fill out the following details.

General

Community Name: Display name of your community
Community Slug: Unique identifier for your community (will be used to create your public URL: open.crowd.dev/{communitySlug} - can’t be changed later!)

Community links

Website: URL of your community/company (the link behind Home)
Discord URL: Permanent Discord invite link (will be used to let visitors join your Discord) - learn here how to create one
Slack URL: Permanent Slack invite link (will be used to let visitors join your Slack)
GitHub URL: Link to your GitHub organization page or repo

Auto-publishing
For auto-publishing conversations to your community help center, you have three options:

None: No conversation is going to be published automatically.
Specific channels: Conversations from selected channels will automatically be published.
All channels: All conversations will automatically be published.

Once you choose an option and save it, it will affect all past conversations in that channel!

Theming

Logo URL: The logo that will be displayed in the upper right corner. (Recommended size: 240x60 pixels)
Favicon URL: The icon that will be displayed in the browser tab. (Recommended size: 32x32 pixels)
Colors: The different colors of your community help center. We recommend playing around with it to see how it affects the appearance.

That's it. Click **save** and your community help center will automatically be created/changed.

Custom domain set-up (Premium only)

To set up a custom domain to your help center go to the Community Help Center app.

Click on the Settings button and add your custom domain (ex: help.crowd.dev) into the following input:

Next, add your a _CNAME _record to your DNS pointing to open.crowd.dev like the following example:

Review and edit existing Conversations

You should see conversations in a list view:

You can click on each conversation and view it in detail:

You can also edit the title of the conversation by clicking on the ✏️ icon. Please note: A changed title will affect your titleSlug before you publish a conversation for the first time: *open.crowd.dev/{tenantSlug}/{titleSlug}*

Filter & Sort Conversations

Active communities often have 100s and 1000s of conversations. To stay on top of it there are a variety of filter and sorting options:

Title: Filter or sort by keywords in the conversation title (usually the first message of conversation)
Status: Filter by the publishing status of the conversation (published/unpublished)
Number of Activities: Sort by the number of activities/replies a conversation received
Last active: Sort by the timestamp of the latest activity/reply that got added to the conversation
Platform: Filter by platform (Discord, Slack, Github, etc.)
Channel: Filter by channel (e.g. #support on your Discord)

To sort conversations, simply click on the table header to sort the referring column either ascending or descending.

To filter conversation, click on Filters, select your desired options, and confirm with Apply. When adding more than one filter you can use AND and OR operators as well.

Auto-publish Conversations

To auto-publish conversations to your community help center, simply go to the settings and choose an auto-publishing option. You can choose between:

None: No conversation is going to be published automatically.
Specific channels: Conversations from selected channels will automatically be published.
All channels: All conversations will automatically be published.

Once you picked an option and saved it, it will affect all past conversations in that channel!

Publish selected Conversations

To publish selected conversations to your community help center, you have two options:

Option 1: Bulk publish conversations in the conversations list view

This option also works well with filters and helps you to publish several conversations at once. You can click the top box to select all or select several at once manually. (Tip: To maximize the number of selected conversations, you can set the pagination to 100/page at the bottom of the table.)

After publishing, your conversation will be shown on open.crowd.dev/{tenantSlug}.

You can simply use Unpublish Conversations to remove them from the public page again.

Option 2: Publish a conversation in the conversations list view

To do so simply click the three dots on the right of a conversation and clicked Publish Conversation. Super simple.

What’s next

Please note that this feature is currently in alpha. For the next releases we plan to:

Add more filters and pre-selection support to identify Conversations worth publishing

What else are you missing? Feel free to add it to our public roadmap.