The BrightStar help centre is the written reference for the whole platform, and it is built so that reading one article gives you the whole feature, not a fragment of it. Everything sits inside one of seven categories — Getting Started, Event Management, Payments and Payouts, Marketing and Automation, Check-in and Scanning, Integrations and API, and For Attendees — and every article belongs to exactly one of them. Six of those categories are written for the organizer running the event; the seventh, For Attendees, is written for the person holding the ticket. That split matters when you're searching: if you're standing at a kirtan door with a scanner in hand, you want an organizer category; if you bought the ticket and lost the confirmation email, you want For Attendees. Each article opens with what the feature is for, walks through setting it up and what the settings mean, explains what happens once it's running, and closes with the questions people actually ask about it — with related guides listed at the end so you can follow a feature into its neighbours without going back to search.
Ways to find what you need
There are three routes into the same set of guides, and none of them is the only correct one:
- 1Browse by category from the help centre index — each category tile lists the articles inside it, useful when you know the area (say, Check-in and Scanning) but not the exact feature name
- 2Search from the box on the index page — results start appearing from two characters onward, so you don't need to finish typing before you see something
- 3Open a feature guide directly if you already know its name — the guides have stable, readable addresses, so you can bookmark or share a link to one
- 4Follow the related guides at the foot of any article — a good way to move from a feature you understand to the one it depends on
How search ranks results
Search covers two things at once: every help centre article, matched on its title and summary line, and BrightStar blog posts filed under learning, matched on title, summary and tags. Both come back in a single ranked list, and each result is labelled with the category it belongs to, so you can tell a help article from a blog post before you open it.
Ranking rewards specificity. An article whose title contains your whole phrase ranks highest of all. Below that, a word matching in a title outranks the same word matching in a tag, which outranks it matching in a summary — and because scores add up across every word in your query, typing a longer, more exact phrase usually surfaces a sharper result than one broad word would. Words of two characters or fewer are ignored when scoring, which keeps short filler words from dragging in matches that have nothing to do with what you meant. If the list is still too broad, you can narrow it to a single category, or to help centre articles only, or to blog posts only.
Why some guides are not indexed yet
BrightStar sometimes documents a feature before it ships, so the guide is ready the day the feature lands rather than written under pressure afterward. Until that happens, the article is deliberately kept out of search engines and out of the sitemap — you won't find it by Googling, and it won't turn up as a stray result for someone who isn't looking for it yet. The gate checks the status of the roadmap item behind the article, not a flag set on the article itself, so shipping the roadmap item publishes the documentation on its own, with no second step for anyone to remember.
The gate also fails closed: if the roadmap item behind an article can't be found, or its status is anything other than shipped, the article stays withheld rather than going live by default. That's a deliberate trade-off — holding a page back a little longer costs some search traffic, but publishing instructions for a feature that isn't actually there yet costs the reader's trust, and BrightStar takes the smaller cost. Ordinary documentation with no roadmap item behind it is never subject to this gate; it's simply live.
Where the content lives
Help centre articles ship with the BrightStar application itself rather than living in a separate content database. That means a guide goes through the same review as the code for the feature it describes, and the two move together — nobody can edit a page in a database and quietly leave it out of step with what the feature actually does. It also means article pages render without needing a database call, which is why a guide loads the same whether or not you're signed in.
Some guides carry live interactive demonstrations built into the page itself, and any guide that mentions pricing pulls its tier figures from the same source the checkout flow uses — so a number you read in an article and a number you see at checkout are drawn from one place and can't disagree.