"Was this helpful?"

A yes/no under each article. No sign-in, because the people who most need to say "no" are the ones who did not find what they wanted and will not create an account to tell you.

The dashboard lists what got voted down. Work down that list.

Each browser votes once on an article: after a reload the reader sees "Thanks for the feedback." rather than the buttons again. The site also takes one vote per article from each internet address a day, so reloading and voting again does not move an article up the list. On a network whose sites share one address, such as example.com/en/ and example.com/fr/, each site other than the main one keeps its readers' votes under a name of its own, since each site numbers its own articles. Readers of those sites may be asked once more about an article they had voted on before, and a vote they cast there before can still show on the main site's article with the same number.

What were you looking for?#

Settings → Article Page → After a No, ask what was missing. A reader who answers No is asked "What were you looking for?" in a small box under the vote, with Send and No thanks. Every note they send is in a What readers said box on the article's own edit screen, newest first, with when each came. Each note there has Delete, and the box has Clear all; only somebody who can edit the article can use them. The dashboard's Unhelpful articles, which lists the eight articles with the most No votes, shows under each of them its newest note and how many there are, linked to that box. An article keeps its 20 newest notes, and deleting the article for good deletes them.

It is on for a new install. A help centre that had the plugin before it keeps it off until you switch it on, and once an article has three No votes the dashboard offers to switch it on, or No thanks to stop asking.

A note is kept only from the reader whose No on that article was just counted, within the hour, and only one for each vote, so nobody can fill the list by sending notes without voting. The words are all that is kept, with the time: not the reader's name, internet address, account or browser. Readers are asked to leave out email addresses, links and any phone or order number. A note is not kept at all when it has an email address, a web address that starts with http://, https:// or www., or seven or more digits in a row (counting digits that only spaces, dots or dashes separate). That last rule is how a phone number looks, and it also drops a note that quotes an order or parcel number that long, which would say who wrote it, or a date written as 2026-09-27; a date written 27/09 is kept. A page named without http or www, such as example.com/returns, is kept. The reader is thanked either way. A note keeps its first 300 characters on one line, with line breaks and runs of spaces made one space, and anything shaped like an HTML tag taken out, such as <b> or <Enter>. The rest stays as the reader wrote it: a backslash, as in C:\Program Files, a %, and a < such as the one in kids <10. A < straight before a letter (or /, ! or ?) that nothing closes, as in a<b, is kept with a space after it (a< b), so it can never be read as the start of a tag. Notes kept by version 1.10.0 lost their backslashes and the words after a <, and stay as they were stored. An article page a page cache has kept asks, or does not ask, as it did when the copy was made: after you switch this on, readers of such a copy are asked once the cache renews it, and after you switch it off, a note sent from an older copy is not kept.