An Update on Recently Archived Community Content

[David]

Update August 10, 2026 9a.m. PST:

As of this morning, we have recovered >99.9% of the content that was archived last week.

We appreciate your patience and apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced. The post below offers more context on what we did, why we did it, and what we'll do in the future to avoid similar issues.

The Community Team

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Over the past few weeks, we archived a large amount of older content across the ServiceNow Community.

The goal behind this effort was to improve the quality and relevance of search results by reducing outdated content that may no longer reflect the current state of the platform, products, or best practices. As our products evolve, older posts can sometimes create confusion, lead developers to obsolete guidance, or make it harder to find current answers. The archival initiative was intended to help members find more relevant and accurate information more quickly. 

However, it's clear from your feedback that the experience was not what many of you expected.

What we learned

After the archival activity took place, we heard concerns from community members across the Community, SNDevs, and other channels. Many of you told us that valuable content had become difficult to access, that archived pages were still appearing in search results, and that there was not enough communication about what was changing or why. 

While the intent was to improve content quality and findability, we recognize that the rollout created frustration and uncertainty for some members of our community.

What we're doing now

We are actively working with our community platform provider to understand our options for restoring archived content at scale. We know many of you have asked whether archived discussions can be brought back, and that is currently an area we are investigating. 

As soon as we have clarity on what can be restored, how restoration would work, and any associated timelines, we will share an update with the community.

Our commitment going forward

This experience highlighted several important lessons for our team.

Before making future large scale content changes, we will:

• Publish a customer facing announcement before significant archival activities occur.
• Provide a clear explanation of why the change is being made and how it benefits the community.
• Establish and communicate a remediation or recovery plan before executing large scale content changes.
• Gather community feedback earlier in the process when changes may impact member access to historical content.
  
  

Thank you!

The ServiceNow Community exists because of the time, expertise, and generosity of the people who contribute to it every day. We appreciate everyone who took the time to share feedback, raise concerns, and help us understand the impact of this change.

Your feedback is helping us improve both our content strategy and the way we communicate future changes.

We'll continue to share updates as we learn more about restoration options and next steps.

Thank you for your patience and for helping make the ServiceNow Community better for everyone.

[Michael Ramos]

One thing you could consider as well is adding some kind of banner or something on older articles warning about potentially outdates information.

That said, there is a lot of stuff in ServiceNow that hasn't changed much in many years so really old community content is still relevant and has likely been helping people for years.

But I imagine you all realize that since you are attempting roll things back! Cheers to that!

Perhaps adding a modern relevance rating based on recent likes on the posts or something may be useful too. If its old and has been recently marked helpful by a lot of users, then that might be a good sign its still being helpful and potentially relevant. You could use information like that to help you key off of and present some context to viewers of old articles on how relevant it may still be.

Maybe add a feature that encourages people to mark it helpful if its really old and helped them.

[JuliusE]

This is dumb.  As a newer dev to ServiceNow I find the perfect article(s) and they're archived.  If I want a bad customer experience I'll stick with Microsoft.

[amaria]

lists and filters task is failed while processing . How to rectify it ? sir

[Simon Hendery]

Thanks for (finally!) coming clean about what happened. But, wow, this is real amateur hour stuff.

For the love of all things holy, when will ServiceNow ditch the utterly useless Khoros platform that's at the heart of the problem here, and has been impeding the community experience for years now?

[MunishwariM]

good

[iekosmadakis]

Thanks for addressing this and for listening to our Community feedback.

My main concern is simple: old content does not necessarily mean obsolete content. Many of these posts contain solutions, edge cases and knowledge that developers still find through bookmarks, Google searches and increasingly through AI tools.

Removing access doesn’t just affect existing developers. It also makes learning and troubleshooting harder for new developers and reduces the original source material available for verification and context.

I shared some more thoughts on the wider consequences in my Linkedin profile as well: https://lnkd.in/p/dygcSjDy

Interested to hear how others in the Community see this.

[JustineDavis]

I wanted to provide a quick update on the content restoration effort. 

Since our original post, we've successfully restored approximately 75% of the content impacted by the archival issue. We know many of you rely on this content every day, and we're glad to see a significant portion of it available again. 

Our team has also worked with our community platform provider to investigate why the remaining content has not yet been restored. The issue has been isolated, and their infrastructure teams are currently working through the recovery process for the remaining posts. 

We're continuing to monitor progress closely and will share another update as soon as we have more information. Restoring community knowledge and minimizing disruption for our members remains our top priority. 

Thank you for your patience and for continuing to provide feedback throughout this effort. 

[Admin CJ]

Between the poor training material not matching, the offline messages, and the inaccuracies of how much one is using a pdi, how can one learn? I was in the middle of backing up my PDI, and it went offline. And I am on a deadline to be deleted. How can you continue to delete when you are at fault? 3 hours offline, and I need to get on now. Why this added stress? You need to pause this. No way of contacting anyone about PDI's and the community is going wild, yet you are continuing with no care

[Mark Manders]

@JustineDavis shouldn't the top priority of the Community be to ensure information remains available? I don't know what kind of AI was used for messing this up so bad, but at the moment ServiceNow is fixing a lot of things that they broke themselves.

Why didn't anyone check on this before archiving? Why wasn't a rollback scenario in place in case anything went wrong? Why can 75% be restored and 25% can't? That's information you should know when a 3rd party is involved, right? Thanking for patience doesn't really help when people are frustrated with how ServiceNow is handling their way of enhancing knowledge. PDIs, NowLearning, Community. Things go wrong way too much and they all have the worst support possible.

[goldenjc97]

I would agree with those that old content does not always mean stale/incorrect. There have been many times I have found articles that are years old that may not be the exact same solution today, but it will get me close enough to figure the rest myself. Thanks for listening to the community and fixing it!