Why are retired articles viewable on service portal?

[Suzanne H]

When using a permalink that was shared in the past, service portal users are able to see retired articles. Is this expected behavior? The same retired articles are not visible when searching by short description or KB#. How do I hide all retired articles on the portal?

[Lauren Methena · Accepted solution]

Hi, Suzanne! Is this happening across the board? Do the retired articles show up in search results?

The only time retired articles show up for us is when: 1. someone has clicked on a permalink and 2. the user in question has certain permissions and accesses, such as knowledge manager or knowledge contributor access.

However, the retired articles never show up in search results. So, it's only a problem when someone like myself clicks on a link in an article and that link takes me to a retired article. Standard access users will get a "knowledge not found" message or something similar. I see the article.

There's supposed to be a label, such as "draft," "review," "expired," "retired," that knowledge managers can see. We're having an issue with that right now and the labels aren't appearing. But usually, the labels appear in the portal so you know the status of an article.

I would go back and review your permissions. See if there is a group that everyone was put in accidentally that you can take them out of.

I hope this helps! Please feel free to reply if you have follow up questions.

UPDATE: Just wanted to add that we literally have it documented as part of our retirement process to do a search for all links to retired articles. If you're using the permalink for your article links, the search can be as simple as Content > Contains > [KB# of the retired article] AND Workflow > is one of > Draft, Review, Published (etc.). (Adding the workflow states keeps the outdated versions of articles from appearing in your results.) That way, you can edit, delete or redirect any links that are going to retired articles.

[Suzanne H]

Thanks Mike,

I confirmed that end users are not able to see the retired article on the service portal. The knowledge managers do see the retired article.