Section access, sign in with your product, and a big week for security

Not every reader should see every page. Your enterprise docs, your partner guides, and your internal runbooks need different doors. Now you can lock whole sections, choose whether locked content is hidden or teased, and let readers sign in with the account they already have in your product.

• 🔐 Section access: Restrict entire sections to signed-in readers or specific user groups

• 🔒 Locked, but visible: Show restricted items with a lock and your own message, like "Upgrade to Enterprise"

• 🔑 Sign in with your product: One-click single sign-on that sends readers through your own login

• 🛡️ Security and privacy: A completed penetration test, a written no-training guarantee, and a rewritten privacy policy

Restrict sections to the right readers

You can now restrict a whole section, not just collections and articles, to signed-in readers or specific user groups. Everything inside inherits the rule unless you set it otherwise.

For readers without access, choose what they see:

• Show with a lock: The item stays in navigation with a lock, your own message, and a button, like "Upgrade to Enterprise" or "Contact sales"

• Hide: The item doesn't appear at all

The AI assistant knows when a question is about something the reader can't open. It can point them to it by title, following your instructions, without ever revealing what's inside. Locked items only appear on help center pages, never in the widget, MCP, llms.txt, sitemap, or RSS.

Restricting access requires the Pro plan. See Section and collection access.

Sign in with your product

Readers can now sign in to your help center with a Continue with {your product} button. It sends them through your own login and back, already signed in. Set it up under Help Center > Access Control > Single sign-on, with your login URL, button name, and logo. Single sign-on requires the Pro plan. See Sign in with your product.

The sign-in page has also been redesigned with your logo, and public help centers can now offer the same sign-in options (email, your identity provider, or a shared password) as private ones. Admins can edit a reader's properties right from the reader panel, which updates the user groups they belong to. See Edit reader properties.

Security and privacy

Your help center holds your product knowledge and your customers' questions. This month we put a lot of work into proving that's safe with us.

• Penetration test: We ran a penetration test of Ferndesk in three rounds, on top of an independent security assessment in May, and fixed the confirmed findings. A small number of lower-risk items are scheduled as follow-ups.

• Your content never trains AI models: Every language model, embedding, and search request Ferndesk makes now tells our AI providers not to train on it, and only reaches providers whose terms say they don't. This is enforced in one place, so no feature can skip it. The product videos Fern watches go to a provider whose terms also rule out training.

• Time-limited staff access: When our team needs to look at your workspace to help you, that access now ends after one hour and is logged.

• A privacy policy you can actually read: We rewrote our privacy policy and terms of service in plain English. Our subprocessors are listed on our trust portal.

• Delete means delete: Deleting a workspace now erases its data from our database, files, search indexes, cached pages, and analytics, and backups expire within 30 days. You can also delete your own account from your profile settings. See Delete your workspace.

• Privacy requests: Anyone can ask us to export, correct, or delete their data through our privacy request form and get a reference number to track it.

• Report a vulnerability: Found something? Email [email protected]. Our vulnerability disclosure policy explains how we handle reports.

Other improvements

• Import from Fumadocs: Bring over Fumadocs sites with their tabs, sidebar order, icons, callouts, cards, steps, code blocks, images, and videos. See Migrate your help center to Ferndesk.

• More reliable automatic screenshots: Hover menus stay open in the frame, arrows aim at the exact element, sign-in pages protected by Cloudflare Turnstile work, and Fern now checks every screenshot she delivers before handing it over. See Automate screenshots in your docs.

• Longer product videos: Fern can now watch videos up to about an hour long, and large files are compressed automatically instead of failing.

• Sign in where you left off: If you belong to several workspaces, signing in opens the one you used last instead of your oldest.

• Cards line up: Cards side by side in a columns block are now the same height, with their buttons aligned along the bottom.

• Imported links land in the right place: Migrations now create redirects that land on the right article, new imports from Archbee, GitBook, and Mintlify always show their icons, and a redirect you add yourself now wins over one created by an import.

Fixes

• Deleting a workspace works again, and deleting one also cancels the extra-workspace add-on it was billed with.

• Returning customers see "Subscribe" instead of a trial they can't get, and trialing customers can add a workspace again.

• The Slack channel list is no longer empty after connecting Slack.

Breaking changes

• Stronger passwords: New passwords must be at least 15 characters and hard to guess. Existing passwords keep working.

• Short lockouts after wrong passwords: Five wrong passwords in a row trigger a short lockout, except in a browser you've signed in from before.

• Email confirmation for new sign-ups: New email and password accounts confirm their email before signing in. Google sign-in is unchanged.

• Changing your password signs out your other devices.

• New API keys need at least one scope: Existing keys keep working. Keys with only content:read can no longer read drafts. See Manage API keys.

• Only owners and admins manage the JWT signing secret: Editors who used to reveal or rotate it will need an owner or admin. For redirect-based sign-in, pass the token as #jwt= in the URL fragment. See JWT authentication.

• Restricted pages ask readers to sign in: Instead of a 404, a restricted page now shows a sign-in card. The old help-center-wide "let signed-out visitors browse titles" option has been replaced by the per-section and per-collection lock settings above.

• SVG uploads are cleaned: Uploaded SVGs (logos, icons) are cleaned and capped at 2 MB, so SVGs that rely on scripts or external files lose those parts. HTML, XML, and JavaScript files can't be uploaded.

• AI assistant limits per visitor: A single visitor who sends a burst of questions now sees "Too many questions at once" and can try again shortly.

• Custom HTML embeds are verified: An embed that can't be verified for your help center shows an error instead of rendering.

• Connecting GitHub checks your access: You can only link a GitHub installation you have access to. If you can't, ask someone in the GitHub organization that owns it.

• Deleting a workspace asks for its name: Type the workspace name to confirm. You can't delete your account while you're the only owner of a workspace.