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Managing and Troubleshooting Sources

Once a source is connected, this is the page for the day-to-day operations: knowing what state a source is in, refreshing it, fixing failed syncs, and disconnecting cleanly. For first-time connection steps, see Connecting Sources.

Source status

On the Sources dashboard, each connected source's tile tells you one of four things:

  • Refreshing — Mention is fetching the latest catalog from the provider. Large workspaces can take several minutes.
  • Sync failed — the source's last sync did not finish, so its catalog no longer reflects what's in the provider. See Failed syncs below.
  • N inactive — the source has synced items you haven't activated yet. Open the source to pick what Mention should use.
  • No badge — the source is idle, and the asset list reflects the last sync.

A Sync failed badge clears itself as soon as a later sync succeeds, so if you re-run a refresh and it goes through, the source is healthy again.

Manual refresh

Sources refresh themselves as changes arrive where the provider supports it, and every source reconciles on a daily sync behind that — but you can force a sync at any time. Whatever a sync changes reaches the saved answers and articles resting on it as the change happens. The control lives on the source's own page, not the dashboard:

  1. Open Sources from the admin sidebar.
  2. Click the source you want to refresh to open its detail page.
  3. Use the Refresh button in the page header. While a sync is running the button shows a spinner and stays disabled until it finishes.

A refresh re-fetches the catalog from the provider and re-ingests anything that changed. Already-active assets that have been updated upstream are picked up automatically.

If a re-fetched document reads exactly the same as the last time Mention ingested it, nothing further happens: the answers and articles built from it stay as they are. Only a document whose text actually changed is re-read, so an edit to a page's title, properties, or sharing settings costs you nothing.

A sync that comes back empty is treated as a provider problem rather than as "everything was deleted". If a provider lists nothing while Mention still holds assets from it, the sync is marked Sync failed and the assets are left alone, so an outage upstream cannot quietly empty a source.

Where the provider notifies Mention, a single edited document is re-read on its own within a minute of the edit, reaching answers without waiting for the daily reconciliation. Where it does not, the daily sync and this manual refresh are what pick the change up. Each integration's page says which applies to it and what the daily sync still covers.

Failed syncs

When a source shows Sync failed, the most common causes are:

  • Expired credentials — the OAuth token Mention uses has been revoked, expired, or had its scopes narrowed by the provider. Mention attempts to refresh tokens automatically, but some providers require the admin to sign in again.
  • Permission changes upstream — the account that authorized the connection lost access to content it previously had (for example, was removed from a Notion workspace or a Slack channel).
  • Provider outage — the upstream service is unavailable. Retry after the provider's status page reports recovery.

Reconnect to refresh credentials

If a manual refresh keeps failing, the simplest fix is to disconnect and reconnect the source. This re-runs the OAuth flow and refreshes Mention's stored credentials.

  1. Open the failing source from the Sources dashboard.
  2. Disconnect it (see below) and confirm.
  3. Connect the source again, signing in with the same account that has the right permissions in the provider.
  4. Re-activate the assets you want Mention to use.

(Disconnecting removes the source's synced assets, so you'll re-pick what to activate when you reconnect.)

If reconnection still fails, the issue is upstream — verify in the provider's admin console that the account can still access the content you expect.

Disconnecting a source

To remove a source entirely:

  1. Open the source from the Sources dashboard.
  2. Click the trash icon next to the Refresh button in the page header.
  3. A dialog warns that disconnecting removes every synced asset from this source and can't be undone. Confirm with Disconnect.

Disconnection stops further syncs from that provider, revokes Mention's authorization, and removes the assets that came from the source. If you reconnect later, you'll re-discover and re-activate its content.

When to escalate

Most sync issues resolve with a manual refresh or a disconnect-and-reconnect cycle. If a source repeatedly fails after that — especially if you can confirm the underlying credentials and content are healthy in the provider — contact support with the source name and the timestamp of the most recent failure so the issue can be investigated upstream.