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:

layout:
  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 tab has one view per kind of feedback:

• Pages: Ratings of docs pages. Each row shows the page’s navigation title (e.g., “Create a user”), falling back to a slug-derived label for pages that no longer exist, plus whether the page was helpful, the reason and comment (if provided), location, and date.
• Ask Fern: Ratings of Ask Fern answers, from both the side panel and Ask AI in the search dialog. Each row includes the question the reader asked. Selecting a row shows the question and the rated answer, and Open conversation opens the full conversation in the Dashboard’s Ask Fern tab.
• Code issues: Reports of incorrect code examples, with the reported snippet.

Summary tiles at the top of the tab cover the selected date range: total Responses across all kinds of feedback, Pages found helpful, Ask Fern answers found helpful, and Code issues. Page ratings and Ask Fern answer ratings each get their own helpful rate.

Each view can be filtered by date range and searched. Pages and Ask Fern can also be filtered by vote (helpful or not helpful) and sorted by date, and the Ask Fern search matches the reader’s question. Export to CSV downloads the current view with its search and filters applied. On a not-helpful rating or a code issue, Fix with Agent asks Fern Agent to fix the page or code example; for an Ask Fern rating, the request quotes the question and the rated answer.

By default, the tab counts only responses where the reader submitted a reason or comment. To also count thumbs-up and thumbs-down votes without details, open the options button beside the date range and turn on Include votes without details. The setting applies to the rows, summary tiles, filters, and CSV export.

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.