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!

[brianf]

Hi,

I just want to note in our experience if someone followed a link (permalink) to a retired article on the front end they would receive an Article Not Found error, regardless of role.

However, if the link is to article edit view (backend), and they have a role to edit articles (knowledge or higher), they would always get the article.

So after reading your original question, I wondered which link they were using in the articles. The permalink which displays the frontend view of the article or the backend link like you would get from a report or from the all articles list?

[willow1]

brianf - If they have the "front end" link anywhere (in an old email, in another article), they get to the article.

Example: ht tps://<ourinstance>.service-now.com/kb_view.do?sysparm_article=KB0010686

[Dave Smith1]

Willow Fulton wrote:

Thanks for the input, Dave. In our environment, all Fulfillers have the Knowledge role 

Okay.. so it's not actually being a Fulfiller, it's more "users with the Knowledge role" - that's a bit clearer now, thanks!

[Goran WitchDoc]

Hmm. not sure I follow here.. if someone has the itil role, they can read the retired article through the "normal" ui and modules. but if they click through the frontend link, the shouldn't be able to see the article either.

About adding a message you can always put up a addInfoMessage() to show up when you load the article form or alert() if you want a quick popup(which can become annoying perhaps.

[willow1]

Something I noticed today is that the "Active" property on these articles is still set to "true".   It seems like it would be sensible that retiring an article would set that to "false", and that would be the method to block visibility, however I tried manually changing some and it didn't seem to make a difference.   Does anyone know if this SHOULD be the method?