Original Author is notified of later verision changes

[CaitlynD]

Hello

Background context for this issue - Author A originally wrote a series of articles. Author A moved teams and so their articles were updated and the author field changed to Author B or C for the second version of the article. As the articles were not reviewed by authors they retired, so when I found out I went in to update the Valid To date on these articles to republish them. I later received an email from Author A that they were still notified of the changes to all these articles despite no longer being the listed author. The Valid To date is one of the fields we have configured to allow us to edit without checking out/creating a new version.

The article was present in their subscriptions so does this mean that ServiceNow automatically subscribes an author to future versions of that article? 

How do you manage this? Each person now runs the risk of a very long list of subscriptions and too many notifications meaning they'll miss ones that they can actually action. Is there a way to ensure that someone only gets a notification when the current version is edited and they are still an author?

Also, is there a way to quickly remove unwanted subscriptions from a user?

Thanks

[Mark Manders]

Yes. The author is added as subscriber to his articles. That is OOB so they get notified on changes to their work. 
You could apply your own logic that if the author changes, the subscription is removed.

[NabeelJ · Accepted solution]

I believe your 1st question was answered by Mark, that authors are subscribed to their own articles.

For your second question on how do you manage this, unfortunately there is no short/quick way of managing or creating this functionality for notifications to go out only to current authors. But you can put barriers/customisations in place to stop future knowledge subscriptions as Mark suggested. 

For your third question on quickly remove unwanted subscriptions, there is a notification settings page in KB portal:

Once, on that page you can easily unsubscribe to the KB articles and KB's altogether from this page(below):

For further help you can refer to this documentation link:
Manage knowledge subscriptions

And the last resort could be writing a script to manage/update this once.
Let me know if you need help in that and I can spin one up for you.

Hope this helped.

[CaitlynD]

Hi

Thanks for this both - very helpful.

I've passed on the info about altering the logic. As for the notifications - I found the page while impersonating the author to see if I could tell what was going on. It seems like a quite full on process to do them all manually, especially as those lists just have numbers. 

If you are able to provide a script for a once removal that would be great please. I can then explore whether we just add in unsubscribing authors as part of the process we use for switching authors going forward.

Thanks

[Mark Manders]

Just tell the user that he can do it himself if he no longer wants to receive the notifications. It's his article. If you start removing them through a script, you run the risk of removing too much.