Knowledge base

The knowledge base is the hub's library of how-to articles and answers to common questions, written by the people who run the hub. It is at /kb on the hub, and many hubs link it from their help menu. Go there first when your question is about the hub itself — how to get an account onto a cluster allocation, what file sizes a tool accepts, why a session timed out — because somebody has probably written it down already.

This is a short page because the knowledge base is a small feature. For a member there are four things to do: find an article, read it, say whether it helped, and comment on it. There is nothing to set up and nothing to configure, and there is no way to write an article from the hub's public side — articles are written by hub staff in the administrator interface. If you know something the knowledge base should say, tell the support team rather than looking for an edit button.

The knowledge base is not questions and answers

The knowledge base holds settled answers, maintained by staff. Questions & Answers at /answers is where members ask each other things nobody has written down yet. If the knowledge base does not have your answer, that is the next place to go, and a good question there is often what prompts a new knowledge base article. See Questions and answers.

Finding an article

The knowledge base home page lists the categories, the most recent articles, and the most popular ones, with a search box at the top. Type a few words and press Search to find articles by title and text.

Say a student in a lab cannot get a tool to open a 3 GB input file. Type file size into the box on /kb, press Search, and read what comes back; if nothing fits, open the Categories list and look through the category the tool belongs to.

Click a category to see its articles. Each category page has its own search box and a Sort control: Recent puts the newest articles first, Popular puts the highest-rated first. A category may have sub-categories, shown at the top of its page. All articles lists everything in one place.

Every article has a permanent address you can share: https://<your hub>/kb/<category>/<article>.

Reading an article

An article shows its title, its text, and its tags. Depending on how the hub is set up it may also show who wrote it and when it was created, modified, or published. Click a tag to see everything else on the hub with that tag.

Rating an article

At the bottom of an article are two buttons carrying the counts of the members who found it helpful and not helpful. Select one to add your vote. It is worth doing: the Most Popular Articles list on the home page is ordered by these votes, so voting is what pushes the article that solved the student's file-size problem to where the next student will see it.

You have to be logged in. If you are not, the buttons are inactive and read Please login to vote. You can vote once per article, and you can change your vote later.

Commenting

If the hub allows comments on an article, a comment thread and a form follow it. Log in, write your comment, and press Submit. Check Post anonymously to hide your name from other members; hub managers can still see who posted. Reply to a comment with its Reply link to keep the conversation threaded, and use Permalink to link straight to one comment.

Comments may close a while after an article was last updated; when they have closed, the form is replaced by a notice. If a comment is offensive, use its Report abuse link. The comment is marked as reported and the hub's support staff review it.

Where the hub has enabled feeds, the Comment feed link at the top of the thread gives you an RSS feed of that article's comments.

When you cannot find an answer

The three panels down the side of /kb are there for exactly this. They link to the other ways to get help on a hub: ask the community in Questions and answers, report a problem to the support team, or suggest a feature on the Wishlist. See Questions and answers, Support, and Wishlist.