MMashDiv

Install and enable

Activating FAQ & Knowledge Base — the extension is named knowledge_base, the four tables it creates, twelve permission keys, the single KYC gate, the optional DeepSeek key, and where the menus actually appear.

12 min readUpdated 26 August 2026install, permissions, kyc, licence

Activation is a short, fixed sequence — licence, install, switch on — and there is nothing to configure afterwards. The work is in knowing what to look for once it is on, because the label on the menu and the identifier in every error message are different words.

Before you activate

  • Bicrypto core installed and running — see Installing Bicrypto
  • The purchase code for Knowledge Base & FAQs — product ID 39166202 — from your MashDiv dashboard
  • Outbound HTTPS from the server, for licence activation and the release download
  • A shell on the server, for the one command that applies the install
  • Optional: a DeepSeek API key, if you want the AI authoring helpers

That is the whole list. This addon has no other addon as a prerequisite, needs no ScyllaDB, adds no cron job and opens no WebSocket.

Activation

  1. Open the Extension Manager. Go to Admin → System → Extension Manager — the screen at /admin/system/extension, headed Add-ons & Integrations. On the Extensions tab (or by searching for Knowledge) find the Knowledge Base & FAQs card — product ID 39166202 — and click it. The card is not titled "FAQ". Until its licence is activated the card reads Activate, its switch is disabled, and the switch's tooltip reads Activate license first.

    1. The Knowledge Base & FAQs card — click it to open the product page
    2. Its switch stays disabled until the licence is activated

  2. Activate the licence. On the product page press Activate License. Paste the purchase code from your MashDiv dashboard, optionally an email address for update notifications, and press Activate License. The screen confirms License Activated! and returns you to the product page a couple of seconds later. If the server has no outbound access at that moment, the License File tab on the same screen takes the licence certificate downloaded from your MashDiv dashboard instead.

    1. Paste the purchase code here
    2. Activate License — then wait for the redirect back to the product page
    3. License File — the route for a server with no outbound HTTPS
    4. Product ID — for this addon it reads 39166202

  3. Install the release. Back on the product page, now licensed, the Overview tab has a release panel. If it offers Install v…, press it; if it says Up to date on a product you have only just licensed, press Check for Updates once, then install whatever it offers. The Releases tab holds the notes for the version being offered — read them first.

    Install downloads the release, verifies it and extracts it over the project root. It runs no migrations, builds nothing and restarts nothing, so finish it from a shell on the server:

    pnpm updator

    That is the finalise chain — stop, dependencies, schema, seed data, frontend build, start — and it is what makes the addon's four tables, its routes and its screens exist. If the panel still says Up to date after the check there is nothing to download; go straight to the next step.

    1. Check for Updates, then Install v… when it is offered
    2. Releases — the notes for the version you are about to install
    3. The Enabled switch — step 4, not yet

  4. Switch it on. Turn the Enabled switch on — in the product page heading, or on the card in the Extension Manager, which is usable now that the licence is verified. It takes effect without a restart. This is what makes Knowledge Base appear under Extensions → Business Tools in the admin navigation, pointing at /admin/faq, and the reader area answer at /faq; until it is on, neither exists. Confirm both surfaces before you move on.

The licence gate is keyed to route prefixes, and for knowledge_base those are /api/faq and /api/admin/faq. Both the admin screens and the reader-facing help centre run through it — including the endpoints that need no login at all.

If the licence lapses, /faq stops returning articles for anonymous visitors, not just for you. The failure is a 403 whose body names the extension as knowledge_base and the product as 39166202. Neither of those strings appears anywhere in the admin menu, which is why this looks like an unrelated fault the first time it happens.

What activation creates

Four tables, which land when pnpm updator runs the schema step after Install:

Table Holds
faqs The articles. Soft-deleted (paranoid), so filter deletedAt if you query directly
faq_feedbacks One helpful/unhelpful vote per reader per article, with an optional comment
faq_questions Reader-submitted questions — PENDING, ANSWERED or REJECTED
faq_searches One row per recorded search, with the result count it returned

faqs carries indexes on category, pagePath, order and status — the four columns every list in the product filters or sorts on.

Two columns are DataTypes.JSON: tags and relatedFaqIds. That is a native JSON column on MySQL and LONGTEXT on MariaDB, so the driver hands back an array on one and a raw string on the other. The model normalises both to an array before anything reads them. If you query the tables directly, you must handle either shape yourself — this is the single most common cause of a working integration that breaks when moved between MySQL and MariaDB.

If you deploy with DB_SYNC=none, run the backend once with sync enabled so the tables and indexes land. If you build from source, run pnpm types:generate.

Permissions

  1. Open the role that will manage the knowledge base

Twelve keys ship with the platform. Assign them at /admin/crm/role.

Key Grants
access.faq The Knowledge Base dashboard, the Manage screen and the AI screen
view.faq Reading the admin article list, one article, the page list and per-page counts
create.faq Creating an article — and every AI helper
edit.faq Editing, bulk updates, reordering, and per-page enable/disable
delete.faq Deleting an article, a selection, or every article on a page
view.faq.category The category list — and the tag list
access.faq.question The Questions screen
view.faq.question Reading the submitted-question queue
edit.faq.question Answering a question and changing its status
access.faq.feedback The Feedback screen
view.faq.feedback Reading feedback, both the global list and one article's
create.faq.feedback Writing a feedback row through the admin API

Two of those pairings are not what the names suggest, and both bite.

All six AI endpoints gate on create.faq, not on a permission of their own. Every one of them forwards text to a metered third-party model that you are billed for. Granting an author create.faq so they can add articles also grants them the ability to spend your DeepSeek balance, in a loop, from the batch-improve screen.

If that matters, keep create.faq on a small set of roles.

The tag list is served under view.faq.category, not a tag key. A role that can filter by category can filter by tag; there is no way to separate them.

The screens themselves gate on access.*: the dashboard, Manage and AI screens on access.faq, Questions on access.faq.question, Feedback on access.faq.feedback. A role with view.faq but no access.faq can call the API and cannot open the page.

The one KYC gate

ask_faqtype: booleandefault: off
Lets a verified reader submit a question to the knowledge base. Configured per KYC level at Admin → CRM → KYC

It appears in the KYC level builder as Knowledge Base Inquiries, in the Support category, with a recommended level of 1.

It gates exactly one thing: POST /api/faq/question. Reading articles, searching, browsing categories and viewing statistics are all open to anonymous visitors and have no gate at all. Voting on an article requires a signed-in account but no KYC feature.

So the practical effect of leaving ask_faq off is that the Ask a Question form is present, the reader fills it in, and submission is refused. If you do not want questions, that is the switch — but consider that the submitted-question queue is where the dashboard's most actionable figure comes from.

Rate limits

Two limiters, both enforced in Redis, both fixed in code:

Action Limit
Feedback vote 20 per hour
Question submission 5 per 24 hours

Neither is configurable. If Redis is unavailable, so are these two endpoints.

The optional DeepSeek key

The AI helpers are the only part of this addon that needs anything in .env:

DEEPSEEK_API_KEY="sk-…"

Leave it unset and the addon works completely — you simply write your own articles. The AI buttons remain visible; pressing one returns 500 with DeepSeek API key is not set, and a line is written to the backend log at boot. There is no screen anywhere that tells you the key is missing before you press a button.

The key is shared platform-wide, not scoped to this addon. Read AI-assisted authoring before you hand it out — that page covers what each helper sends, including the one that puts your entire published library into a single prompt.

Where everything is

The admin area is four screens plus one that is not in the menu.

Screen Path Gate
Knowledge Base (dashboard) /admin/faq access.faq
Manage /admin/faq/manage access.faq
Questions /admin/faq/question access.faq.question
Feedback /admin/faq/feedback access.faq.feedback
AI batch improve /admin/faq/ai access.faq

/admin/faq/ai is reachable only from the AI Improve button in the header of the Manage screen. It is a real, permission-gated page; it is simply absent from the menu, so it cannot be found by browsing.

The reader area is three screens: the help centre at /faq, an article at /faq/{id}, and a guided Troubleshooter at /faq/troubleshooter.

Submitted questions also surface in the platform-wide operations queue as User Questions, counting PENDING rows, under the access.faq.question permission. That is often the first place anyone notices a backlog.

Smoke test

  1. Create an article — /admin/faq/manage, Add FAQ. A question of at least 10 characters, an answer of at least 20, a category, and a page path. Save.

  2. Read it as a visitor — sign out and open /faq. The article should appear. Open it; the view counter should move.

  3. Unpublish it — turn its status off in the admin list, then reload the article URL while signed out. It must return not found, not the article. Turn it back on.

  4. Search for a word that is not in it — from /faq. Then check /admin/faq — the query should appear under the search figures with no results. That proves search recording is working, which is the single most valuable thing this addon produces.

  5. Submit a question — as a signed-in reader who passes ask_faq. It should appear on /admin/faq/question as pending.

  6. Answer it — the asker receives an email, and an in-app notification if their address belongs to an account.

If step 4 shows nothing, see Troubleshooting; if step 6 sends no email, the fault is in your mail configuration, not here — the answer is saved either way and the failure is written to the backend log.