Collecting feedback and suggestions from users

Fern offers a variety of ways to track feedback and suggested improvements from users.

On-page feedback

By default, every Markdown page of your docs contains a feedback component at the bottom of the page:

Disable on-page feedback

Set hide-feedback to true under layout in docs.yml to remove the feedback component from every page:

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layout:
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  hide-feedback: true

To remove it from a single page instead, set hide-feedback: true in that page’s frontmatter.

Viewing feedback in the Dashboard

You can view all on-page feedback responses in the Feedback tab of the Fern Dashboard. The table shows feedback per page, including whether the page was helpful and the reason (if provided), plus channel, location, and date. You can filter by date range and export results to CSV.

Edit this page

Allow users to suggest changes to the current page directly from your docs. There are two modes for this feature:

• GitHub (default): Clicking the button links directly to the page’s source file in your GitHub repository, where users can suggest changes. This is ideal for public-facing sites with a public repository, allowing external users to submit pull requests.
• Dashboard: Clicking the button opens a screen where users can choose between starting a Fern Editor session for that page or navigating to the source file on GitHub. This is especially useful for internal sites where many or most viewers also have editor access and can make changes directly via Fern Editor.

You can configure this feature — including whether the button links directly to GitHub or presents editing options — in the global configuration. You can also override the edit URL for an individual page in the frontmatter.