Public Site

From CompassDocs 0.14, a space can be shared with people outside your organization — customers, partners, the internet — with no account and no sign-in. Mark the space Public, switch on the public site, and its published documents are served read-only at https://YOUR-HOST/public.

Typical uses: a customer help center, public policies, an API reference — while everything else in the workspace stays behind the login.

The three visibility tiers

Every space has one of three visibility settings (Settings → Spaces → Edit → Who can see it):

Tier	Who can read it
Public	Anyone on the internet — no account needed
Internal	Everyone who signs in (the default)
Private	Admins plus granted groups

Upgrading from an earlier version? Spaces previously called “public” meant everyone signed in — they are migrated to Internal automatically, once. Nothing becomes externally visible by upgrading.

Turning it on

External exposure requires two deliberate steps, so it can never happen by accident:

1. Mark a space Public — Settings → Spaces → Edit → Public — anyone, no sign-in. The editor warns you and asks to confirm.
2. Enable the public site — Settings → Public site → Enable the public site. This is the master switch, off by default: while it’s off, every /public page returns 404 and public attachments aren’t served, regardless of space settings.

The Public site page lists every Public space with a View link so you can check exactly what the world sees.

What anonymous visitors get

• A branded landing page at /public listing the Public spaces (your workspace name and logo, from Settings → Workspace).
• Per-space article lists and full document pages — markdown, run blocks (copy-only, as always), tags, updated dates, and attachments.
• Search, scoped strictly to published documents in Public spaces, and rate-limited to prevent abuse.
• A Sign in link for your own team.

And what they never get: drafts, suggestions, version history, Internal or Private content (those 404 without revealing the space even exists), AI answers, the REST API, and the Claude connector — all of those require an account.

Search engines

By default, public pages carry a noindex directive: anyone with the link can read them, but they won’t appear in Google. If you want the content discoverable (a help center usually does), switch on Allow search engines on the Public site page. Search-result pages stay noindex either way.

Share links: one document, one link

Sometimes the whole-space public site is too much — you want to hand a customer one SOP. Public share links (a separate switch on the same settings page, also off by default) let anyone with edit rights create a tokenized read-only link to a single published document from the Share link card in its side panel:

• Unguessable and unlisted — high-entropy tokens, always noindex, independent of the public-site master switch.
• Optional expiry (7/30/90 days) and one-click revoke or regenerate (the old link stops working immediately). The card counts how often the link was opened.
• Scoped tightly — inline images and attachments work through the link, but only for that document; the token unlocks nothing else.
• Fails safe — unpublishing or trashing the document kills its link (republish revives it), and turning the switch off disables every link at once. Creates and revokes land in the audit log.

Things worth knowing

• The approval workflow still applies. Publishing into a Public space follows the same review rules as everywhere else, and the review queue badges those changes with 🌐 Goes public so approvers know the audience.
• Attachments are your bandwidth — files on public documents are downloadable by anyone; keep an eye on what gets attached there.
• Everything is audited: enabling/disabling the site, the indexing toggle, and space visibility changes all land in the audit log.
• Use a proper custom domain with HTTPS — external visitors will see the URL.