Should links to KB articles that have been retired still work?

[willow1]

We are on Istanbul, and have a lot of KB articles that refer and link to other articles.   We also have a lot of users that email links to articles to other users.

We noticed recently that when an article is Retired, it is still accessible through these links, and there is no indication that it is Retired.   Has anyone else experienced this?   Is this "as designed", or are we missing something in our configuration?

Our hope is that users would get something like "article not found" in this case.

Thanks for any guidance!

[Goran WitchDoc]

End users would get "article not found". Fulfiller OOB can see retired articles as well. If you want you can throw in a ACL making the retired KAs only available for specific roles etc. Or at least throw in a message that this is retired, please dont read

//Göran

[willow1]

Ideally, Fulfillers (and any others with Knowledge role) would be able to see retired articles through the lists if they go into the actual Knowledge Module to manage content (in case they need to reference or re-publish) - but not through any of the "consuming" sources.   They already don't come up in search results, so that's good - but in this case, even if Impersonating someone that is NOT a fulfiller but does have Read access to a KB, they can still get to it from a link.

As far as adding a message - do you just mean adding a message in the body of the article, or is there another way to get some sort of pop up or alert to trigger?

[Dave Smith1]

Willow Fulton wrote:

Ideally, Fulfillers (and any others with Knowledge role) would be able to see retired articles through the lists if they go into the actual Knowledge Module to manage content (in case they need to reference or re-publish) 

I agree that those with a specific role (perhaps knowledge) can view retired articles... but don't see why fulfillers should.

The objective of retiring an article is to prevent ROT (Redundant, Outdated, Trivial) content contaminating live content - retired articles represent deprecated content.   If anything, I'd expect fulfillers to not be exposed to outdated information during the course of their responsibilities.

I feel this is a fault, that retired articles are omitted from one view but still accessible through another. I've seen this "corrected" via use of a business rule, but I believe the rule is applying functionality that should be baseline.

[willow1]

Thanks for the input, Dave.   In our environment, all Fulfillers have the Knowledge role and are trusted and empowered to create and maintain any content in 2 of our Knowledge Bases (one visible to everyone through the portal and the console and an additional one only visible through the Console.   If they have reason to retrieve and re-publish a Retired article, we want them to be able to do so without needing to request through an Admin.  

When they go into Knowledge through the List view in the Knowledge app, we train them to understand that they are in a maintenance mode where they can see all workflow statuses, bulk edit items, etc.

Our last KB platform worked as you describe and we often had people contact us to get access to items retired by mistake or that they needed to reference or re-write to make current.