Documentation sites

Your documentation site is the first thing Overdesk grounds a draft in. You give it an address, Overdesk reads and indexes the site in the background, and drafts can quote your articles and link to them. Drafting stays paused until at least one site is set.

Add your documentation

1. Open Settings → Knowledge base.
2. Under Documentation sync, enter the home page of your documentation in Docs site URL(s). To add more than one site, separate the addresses with commas.
3. Select Save on that card.

Only admins can change these settings. The first crawl starts shortly after you save your first address, and the site is read again every night after that. To start a crawl at any time, an admin selects Sync docs on the Knowledge base page.

What Overdesk reads

Overdesk treats the address you enter as a starting point. It follows the links on that page, and on the pages they lead to, as long as they stay on the same site and under the same address. Enter https://docs.example.com/product-a/ and Overdesk reads the pages under /product-a/ and nothing else on that site.

A few things follow from that:

• Enter the home page of your docs, not a single article. The crawl begins at the starting page, and what gets stored is the pages it leads to.
• By default Overdesk follows links up to 2 clicks away from the starting page. Max crawl depth raises that for sites whose articles sit deeper.
• The site has to be public. Overdesk reads it the way a visitor would, without signing in.
• A page needs a title and some real text to be kept, and a crawl stops at 5,000 pages per site.

Fine-tuning the crawl

Four optional fields sit below the address. Leave them blank unless something looks wrong. Whatever you set applies to every site in the list.

Field	Use it when
Link selector	Whole sections of your docs are being missed. Point it at the links Overdesk should follow, such as your docs navigation.
Content selector	Navigation or footer text is ending up in your knowledge base. Point it at the element that holds the article text.
Title selector	Article titles come out wrong. Left blank, Overdesk uses the page heading.
Max crawl depth	Articles sit more than 2 clicks from your docs home page. Expect a longer sync.

The three selectors are written as CSS selectors, for example nav a, article or .page-title.

When a site can't be reached

If you list several sites and one can't be reached, the others still sync, and the run on the Runs page carries a warning in Details saying how many failed. If none can be reached, the run fails and says so there. Pages Overdesk already holds stay in the knowledge base either way.

A docs address is always required

Drafting checks for a documentation site address before every draft, and other sources don't take its place. Even when your help center articles sync on their own, keep at least one address here. See Help center articles and Point Overdesk at your docs.