How best (best practice) to inactivate an old Knowledgebase and thousands of articles. Not delete.

[Denise Smith]

I have to shut down (deactivate) an old Knowledgebase and it has over 7000 articles (some retired) what is the best practice so nobody has access to this anymore?

1/ inactivate the KBase itself? 

2/ or deal with this at the article level and perhaps retire all articles??

Quick help/steps much appreciated!

Thanks.

[Allen Andreas · Accepted solution]

Hi,

In your case, you'd want to set the "Active" field to false for the respective knowledge base.

Which would take care of the articles not being searchable, etc.

It takes a minute or two once you do this, but then as you refresh, you'll start to see that the articles don't show up for that KB anymore, etc.

However, if the user has the direct URL to the article, it is still accessible, so you would have to address this by retiring the articles or something to that extent.

Please mark reply as Helpful/Correct, if applicable. Thanks!

[Denise Smith]

thanks I wondered if that was all I had to do. 

[Michael QCKM]

Yes, be careful of those direct links... especially if they were sent out in previous emails or on some website, etc. They appear to still work that way. I believe we had our team setup a rule that triggered an alert message to say "this Knowledge Base is no longer active" when connecting to an article from that KB - so the user knows what up.