Sometimes all you need is a help centre: articles your customers can read, with no discussions on the site. Tender can run as a knowledge base only.
Turn off discussions
- In the dashboard, go to Account & Settings › Settings (the Site Settings page).
- Find Public Forums and click Off. The change is saved straight away.
- The box now says Forum disabled and has an Allow private discussions checkbox, ticked. Untick it, then click Save your changes at the bottom of the page.
Turning the forum off always ticks Allow private discussions again, so do step 3 each time you switch the forum off.
Make sure the knowledge base is on
Go to Account & Settings › Settings › Knowledge Base Setup and check that Tender's Knowledge Base System is On. It's on for new sites.
What your customers see
- Visitors who open your site's home page are taken to the knowledge base.
- There's no Start a discussion button, no list of discussions, and no Log in or Create a profile link in the header.
- People can't sign up on their own; you can still invite them.
Every heading in an article has a # link beside it (it shows when you point at the heading), so you and your customers can share a link to one part of an article.
Logging in
Since the header has no Log in link, go to /login on your site (for example https://yoursite.tenderapp.com/login), or open /dashboard: Tender asks you to log in first. Once you're in, the header has your name and a Dashboard link as usual.
Going back
Click On under Public Forums to bring discussions back. If you want private discussions only (customers can write to you but can't see each other's discussions), leave the forum off and keep Allow private discussions ticked. See Locking down your Tender: privacy and closed sites for more ways to limit who sees what.