Sooooo...we purchase and pay a yearly maintenance fee for an add-on to hide something we didn't want in the first place? Just trying to follow the logic here. I get that theme and style add-ons may be useful for improving the appearance of the customer portal, but we're talking about something that's an out-of-the-box feature (Search bar) that the vendor should be able to provide some control over. Just my opinion.

SOLUTION: Use a theme or style add-on from the marketplace and you could design your customer portal without search bar.

Being able to disable the search field would be very beneficial since we use service desk projects for many other teams besides the service desk team. Some of those SD projects don't have an associated knowledge base for users to utilize and therefore can be a bit confusing. 

Created on 21 Oct 2015...

I hope this is still considered because this will be very usefull

this would be very helpful since we have not built out our knowledge base yet

+1

This is beyond comprehension.  The request forms allow for limiting content by label, but no such feature on the top search bar.  AND, the search results show information from the page even though it could be hidden - specifically PAGE PROPERTIES!  I don't understand how this can't be a trivial fix to also allow for limiting to label the search results on that field.

This is causing confusion for our users. I find it a little odd that it's not possible to disable this search box on a portal-by-portal basis. Some portals need it, some don't!

Have there been any further developments on this? 

Most of our customers just want two request "Incident" and "Service Request" and no knowledge base. The search bar is no use in those service desk, and confuses more than helps.

We definitely this feature. The search bar is very confusing and there has multiple requests by our internal users to remove this.

Agreed. There should be an option within individual service desk projects to use or not use the search bar. 

For some projects we have no knowledge base at all. So the search bar is very confusing and missleading for our customers! They try searching for existing tickets and of course cannot find them. I don't want to use another plug-in.

HelpCenter Corrector is global only. So, if you have multiple teams with service desks, search will be disabled for all. Inconvenient if some teams are actually using the Confluence kbase functionality...

 Why do we need YET ANOTHER plug-in (free for now, of course, but as all plug-ins do, it will eventually COST you)...for something that should be easy enough for Atlassian to allow a remove / hide option out-of-the-box?

Sadly the Helpcentre Corrector is only available for Server installations.  We are on Cloud, so we still need a way to get rid of the useless and confusing search bar.

Thanks atlassian1511860105 

The  Helpcentre Corrector add-on functions as described and we'll use it to hide the Search Bar for particular Portals.

Cheers,

Peter Quick

Pronto Software

Melbourne, Australia

Voted! We need to disable Search for a handful of client facing SDs, with no Confluence link, for relatively low volumes of service requests.

You can try out our HelpCenter Corrector free plugin to resolve this problem.

This is indeed confusing for our customers too. We would love this feature to be implemented.

The seach bar confuses my customers, and it would be helpful to have a setting to remove it. Many of us have our own Knowledge Bases - could you pls provide an opportunity to link to that?

Upvote

barby.sizemore1023042016 - I tried your suggestion and turned on the sd.global.portal.rt.search.disabled dark feature. I did this by going to the Administration area, choosing Advanced Settings, and locating the "jira.enabled.dark.features" key. There was no value for this key, so I put "sd.global.portal.rt.search.disabled" as the value.

Nothing happened. The "Search" bar is still present on the customer portal. Is there something I missed doing? 

Yes, please add this feature.

Yes - please add this feature  - would be very useful!

I have been asked to Remove search option as well

The portal has been updated and this is still not an option? It doesn't make sense that I can change background colors and add images but still can't hide a non-functional component from the screen. This would take 30 seconds to implement if we had access to CSS.

I have been asked to remove it, it is distracting and non-functional in our use of the Help Center

It would be nice to be able to toggle it on/off

I concur with the request to be able to remove the search filed from the portal. It is not useful for all customers.

I agree this needs to be removed ASAP.  

Why is this still a suggestion? I need to remove it from one for the portal version and I see that I have very little control over the content. Unexpected.

We also need this feature.  Having this search bar visible when someone is not using knowledge base is misleading and a bad user experience.  Please help us help our clients.  

It should be simple enough for JIRA to know if Confluence is purchased or not.  If not, then search bar is not visible.  If yes, then it is.  It is very misleading to out customers. If I had purchased Confluence, then it all makes since.  I would rather a change be made that would allow me to add hyperlinks to the portal page.

We need to remove the Serach Field ASAP!! 

I agree completely with the other guys: The search field confuse the end user. 
It would be awesome, if we could be able to hide this search field from the portal.

I vote yes to this feature as well.  It will allow admins the ability to customize and use service desk for other applications.

I've also voted for this issue; the Search field is not required for those who have not purchased the KB (Confluence) and will confuse end users. 

We do not have a technically savvy user base (social services organization)... and our users would never utilize a knowledge base. So, it would be awesome to be able to hide this from the portal. It confuses users.

As this is an urgent problem for us, I agree that there is a solution and much like a workaround quickly. Getting a little worried when I commented on this case, I do not really see Atlassian's answer to this case.

I am facing the same it create confusion, please do me know as well when we find out any resolution for this bug or any feature that will hide the search box.

I have also voted for this feature.  My use case is a small company that is just starting to adopt JIRA Service for customer support needs.  We don't yet have a robust knowledge base on which to search, but we have migrated away from GrooveHQ to consolidate onto the Atlassian platform.  Giving customers a web portal to request support and see status is important to us.  Confusing them with a search box that doesn't really search anything useful is less important.  In a couple user studies, I have watched people type the summary of their support request into the search box and then get confused.  All I wanted them to do is notice the Support Request link about one inch below the search box, but because the search box is so large and prominent, all the users' attention was drawn to it and the rest of the page ignored.  I would love the option to disable this search box until we have a more robust self-help knowledge base created.

@Karabo Not in the cloud version no it appears not. Really hope someone corrects me here! 

@Atlassian please please make this removable!

Please assist, can i remove the search bar on the customer portal?

Barby – Thanks for your idea. I don't recognize your workaround, though, as something available in the cloud version – are you using cloud or hosting?

This Search bar seems useless unless you have 50 groups listed .. its taking up a lot of Real Estate on the screen.

Please give us the option to remove the Search bar.

The workaround I found for this is to turn on the sd.global.portal.rt.search.disabled dark feature.

Agree with above comments.  Confusing to users as we don't integrate Confluence.

Yes! Same as all the above. Please make search bar optional, we don't want it visible to our project users. 

Would also like to remove/hide all links to 'Help Centre' as it's confusing and we just want users to see the portal and raise a ticket. 

This is problematic for us too. We do not want to maintain a knowledge base for our analytics platform, which is what our service desk supports. We also want to exclude access to the Help/Support Center. Only a useful feature if we can control when we use it.

agreed. Access to a knowledge base/search function is not useful for our implementation. We're getting customers entering their request into the search bar, and getting frustrated that they aren't progressing further.

Fully agree to previous posters, search bar is completely unnecessary in our case and only alienate customers. Please include the option to disable search bar.

As others have mentioned, it serves no purpose other than being a huge distraction for many service desks. Customers tend to go straight for the search bar and when it doesn't give anything, it's just confusing. Please allow administrators to remove it!

The search bar bypasses any security that may have been programmed or configured, for example from use of other plug-ins such as InTenso Extension for JSD. 

It gets worse when public sign-up is enabled because this no longer requires new accounts to be added to the jira-customer group or any other group that may have been configured to control access to request types.

The search bar has been a very disruptive addition to SD for us and we would like to be given the option to enable or disable it. 

In fact, as new or dramatic features are implemented into Atlassian products, we would like to see an option to enable and disable them. We understand perfectly well this will not be possible for all features, but also Atlassian cannot predict the many different ways that customers use and configure their products and the cause and effect the removal, addition or change of features may have. This is not the first time we have been painfully affected by feature changes. The change to portal/SD notifications comes to mind. It should be a policy for Atlassian to consider the impact to customer configurations and build in an opt-out wherever possible. 

Thanks, 

Please provide an option to hide the search bar. In our project it is of no value at all and is just distracting to the users. It cannot be a big issue for Atlassian to provide such an option and it would make a great difference in terms of UX. People think they need to provide some sort of information in the search bar, but don't know what and get confused. So instead of providing us with valuable feedback they'll just leave the page because it doesn't make sense to them.

Hey,

In my case it would be great if this search box can be hidden per individual Portals. We have a few use cases where the we require the user to raise a new ticket every time and the user should not search for an solution but create a ticket. E.g. Incident Reporting, Customer Feedback etc etc.

I have tried to just disable the KB setting in these projects but the search box turns up anyhow!

Cheers,

// Svante

Hello, I also have users who are requesting this feature, as it is 'distracting' to them.  Please include it in the next release.

For setups where there is only minor interaction with customers, this searchbox has no additional value, and only works distracting.

Please provide a simple option to disable it.

I would second the need for an option to remove the search bar.

For new or rarely used service desks they provide little to no use and from the user testing I have done there is a mjaor UX floor - As users tend to go straight for the search bar ignoring the raise a request options below it.

When they search for something and the get no results - the raise a request options disappear and I have seen users get stuck - they are left with no search results and no way to raise a request.

Subscribing. This is a minor issue for Atlassian to deliver that I guess many clients struggle to find an solution for in the current administration. I get the feeling that the reason for not delivering this as an option is that they want customers to sign up to Confluence as well, not just Service Desk... Not ok

Hello,

we are using more SDs and want to make the navigation as easy as possible.
Therefore we need to have the description available for the separate Service Desks we prepared on the landing page. (As it used to be in the older design of the landing page).

Suggested Solution
Make it possible to switch back to the previous style.
Introduce more possibilities how to customize the landing page.

Best regards,
Petr

Hi shane.whybrow1244231883,

At the moment it's not possible to remove the search bar on the Help Centre screen.

The request type search returns results based on matching:

1. Keywords in the request type name and request type description
2. Past tickets that have been created and learning the associated request type

The best way to influence the search results at the moment is to use keywords in the request type name or description to match the search. Over time, as the number of tickets across your service desk grows, search will learn associations between tickets and the request types.

If you have examples of searches that work and don't work, along with your request type configuration, we can pass them on to the engineering team to take a closer look.

Cheers,

-Shihab

Hello there,

Thanks for raising this - to clarify, this bar appears even though we do not use Confluence. If confluence isn't in place, then the search terms are derived from the form descriptions which can end up returning results that are not accurate.

I believe the ability to add 'search tags' (or use labels from requests) to populate this search would make the search more useful and accurate. Also, the ability to turn it off would be good too!

Cheers,