Preventing users from accessing attachments on retired articles

[wysenk]

Has anyone found a solution to prevent users from accessing attachments on retired articles? 
The situation is that users tend to save the 'old' URL as bookmarks and with document viewer enabled, users still have access to these attachments that are attached to retired articles. 

[Sumanth16]

Hi @wysenk ,

To prevent the retired Knowledge Article's attachments from appearing in the search results, you need to remove the attachments from the indexed content in ServiceNow. Here are the steps to follow:

1. Navigate to the retired Knowledge Article.
2. Remove all the attachments from the retired Knowledge Article.
3. Publish the retired Knowledge Article without any attachments.
4. Perform a full reindexing of the knowledge base.
5. Verify that the retired Knowledge Article is not appearing in the search results.

Once you have removed the attachments from the retired Knowledge Article, you should consider deleting the attachments from the system altogether to free up storage space.

Additionally, you can configure the search criteria to return only relevant Knowledge Articles to the end user. One way to achieve this is by setting up the search criteria to include only Knowledge Articles that have attachments related to the search term entered by the end user. This approach will ensure that only Knowledge Articles that have a specific attachment related to the search term are returned in the search results.

Mark the comment as a correct answer and also helpful once worked.

Thanks & Regards,
Sumanth Meda

[wysenk]

Hi, this is not a case where the attachments are appearing in the search results. Instead, users are saving the hyperlink. 

[Sumanth16]

Hi @wysenk ,

Please refer below thread:

https://www.servicenow.com/community/now-platform-forum/restricting-access-to-retired-knowledge-base...

Mark the comment as a correct answer and also helpful once worked.

Thanks & Regards,
Sumanth Meda

[Kim27]

Have you tried unchecking "display attachments"? I'm not sure if that would work or not, but it might be worth a try.