diff --git a/docs/source/conf.py b/docs/source/conf.py
index 3879d9b9..abea7500 100644
--- a/docs/source/conf.py
+++ b/docs/source/conf.py
@@ -17,9 +17,9 @@
 # add these directories to sys.path here. If the directory is relative to the
 # documentation root, use os.path.abspath to make it absolute, like shown here.
 #
-# import os
-# import sys
-# sys.path.insert(0, os.path.abspath('.'))
+import os
+import sys
+sys.path.insert(0, os.path.abspath('../..'))
 
 
 # -- General configuration ------------------------------------------------
@@ -81,7 +81,7 @@
 #
 # This is also used if you do content translation via gettext catalogs.
 # Usually you set "language" from the command line for these cases.
-language = None
+language = "en"
 
 # List of patterns, relative to source directory, that match files and
 # directories to ignore when looking for source files.
@@ -90,7 +90,7 @@
 
 # Set up link shortcuts
 extlinks = {
-    'issue': ('https://github.com/edgi-govdata-archiving/wayback/issues/%s', '#'),
+    'issue': ('https://github.com/edgi-govdata-archiving/wayback/issues/%s', 'issue %s'),
 }
 
 # The name of the Pygments (syntax highlighting) style to use.
diff --git a/requirements-dev.txt b/requirements-dev.txt
index dfc990a1..e22e61ce 100644
--- a/requirements-dev.txt
+++ b/requirements-dev.txt
@@ -7,11 +7,15 @@ coverage
 flake8
 requests-mock
 pytest
-sphinx ~=3.1.1
+
+# remove pin after https://github.com/readthedocs/sphinx_rtd_theme/issues/1343
+closes
+sphinx<5.2.0.post0
+
 vcrpy
 twine
 # These are dependencies of various sphinx extensions for documentation.
 ipython
-numpydoc ~=1.0.0
-sphinx-copybutton ~=0.2.12
-sphinx_rtd_theme ~=0.5.0
+numpydoc
+sphinx-copybutton
+sphinx_rtd_theme