Common issues when syncing your knowledge base

Oh no… It looks like you might have encountered a syncing issue 🤯 First of all, don’t worry! Sometimes working with two highly interconnected services such as Notion and HelpKit can be a bit fiddly. Over the past year we have encountered the same issues over and over again and therefore, want to help you locate and fix them as soon as possible.

Before we dive deeper into the most common syncing issues that can occur please take a look at the following two help articles and make sure you are properly following them and understand the difference between syncing your entire knowledge base vs a single article:

In general, HelpKit loves full and complete data. Sometimes you might have forgotten to fill out a database field or left an empty article lingering around somewhere. This can be a potential cause for HelpKit to throw a syncing error. Let’s go over some examples and easy ways to fix them.

🤔 Example: In this example the collection title is missing and HelpKit will throw an error when syncing.

👉 FIX: As a fix please make sure your database fields are not empty and simply remove empty database entries. Then resync your knowledge base via the dashboard.

🤔 Another Example: In this example the subcollection has semi-empty database entries and HelpKit will throw an error when syncing.

🤔 Example: In this example we have 3 articles that aren't really a “full page” yet.

👉 FIX: Please create "real" page by simply adding any sort of text to the Notion page (you can even just create an empty new block). A “real” page has a document icon next to it. Then resync your knowledge base via the dashboard.

🤔 Example: In this example the entire subcollection is empty. HelpKit will throw an error when trying to sync it.

👉 FIX: Please fill your empty tables with at least on article (can even be unpublished). Then resync your knowledge base via the dashboard.

In general, please do not remove or change any of the properties in any of the databases (the tables with your content) in your template. HelpKit won't properly work otherwise.

🤔 Example: In this subcollection someone might have changed the "Date" type to Notion’s internal "Last edited/updated" type. Unfortunately this automatic field does not provide data via Notion's API so HelpKit can not access it.

👉 FIX: Please change it back to its origin database field as set up in the official HelpKit template. Then resync your knowledge base via the dashboard.

In the case of your help articles showing the Last updated “NaN” text, your knowledge base is most likely lacking data from the “Last Updated” field. Please note that sometimes Notion seems to cache this data in a very unpredictable way which means that in order for all dates to show up properly please make sure you have added a date to all of your articles.