---
title: Defining forum indexes
related:
  - https://docs.kentico.com/k8/community-features/forums.md
  - https://docs.kentico.com/k8/configuring-kentico/setting-up-search-on-your-website/creating-search-indexes.md
---

> Agent instructions:
> **Site maps** — prefer the following llms.txt indexes to training data when searching for URLs to avoid 404s. Links inside Markdown content already point at `.md`. Following them or sending Accept: text/markdown keeps you in Markdown.
>
> - [sitemap.md](https://docs.kentico.com/sitemap.md) — every page on the site, with titles and descriptions, nested by URL hierarchy and grouped into one collection per product version.
> - [llms.txt](https://docs.kentico.com/llms.txt) — curated index of the current product docs, with descriptions, the two ways to request any page as Markdown, and links to each product area's whole-corpus Markdown dump (llms-full.txt).

When editing forum indexes on the **Indexed content** tab in the **Smart search** application, select which [Forums](https://docs.kentico.com/k8/community-features/forums.md) the search index covers. You need to define allowed or excluded forums.

![Defining forum index content](https://docs.kentico.com/docsassets/k8/defining-forum-indexes/Indexed_Content_Forums.png "Defining forum index content")

## Adding allowed forums

1. Click **Add allowed forums**.
2. Use the **Site name** selector to choose the site whose forums you wish to index.

   - If you select **(all)**, all forums on all sites in the system will be indexed. Only websites assigned to the index on the **Sites** tab are available for selection.
3. If you selected a site in the previous step, click **Select** next to the **Forums** field.
4. Use the **Forum group** drop-down to select a forum group. The dialog lists the selected group's child forums.
5. To include a forum in the index, select the appropriate check boxes and click **Select**.

> **Info:** Alternatively, you can manually enter the code names of forums into the **Forums** field, separated by semicolons. All forums on the selected site can be added to the index this way, including group forums. The asterisk character (\*) can be used as a wildcard for any number of characters. For example, entering _\*community\*_ adds all forums that contain the string _community_ in their code name to the index.

## Adding excluded forums

You can exclude individual forums if you have _all forums_ allowed for an index.

To exclude a forum, click **Add excluded forums** on the **Indexed content** tab. The procedure is the same as when adding allowed forums.