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,

Changing the rule to start setting the flag on retired articles fixes the issue going forward.   You will also need to edit all your existing retired articles and set the flag to false.   Then your existing retired articles will stop showing up in searches.

So, I should have added that to my last comment...   make the change to work for new articles and manually (or scripted or through the list view) change the flag on all existing retired articles.

I am checking on the details.

[brianf]

Hi,

It appears we created a business rule when we migrated from Knowledge v2 to Knowledge v3 to deal with retired articles.   In my experience, retired articles always have been inactive. I have been using Service Desk knowledge since 2009.

Please understand, I am a Knowledge Manager not a developer.   So I asked.

We migrated last fall to v3 and out dev guy wrote that rule.   He apparently did so to make sure our retired articles were not visible as they had been under v2.

It is completely possible that in knowledge v2 a retired article set to Active =false was a customization also. But it is not very logical to have retired articles searchable.   Also, I do not find references to permissions for viewing retired articles in the Knowledge Properties like I do for Draft and Review statuses.

To me, not setting the active flag to false on retirement is an oversight.   Or not including default rules to not return a retired article in search results.   Others may disagree, but there is a reason we retire articles and that is to remove them from the knowledge base. They should never return in results by users.

[Dave Smith1]

To me, not setting the active flag to false on retirement is an oversight. Or not including default rules to not return a retired article in search results. Others may disagree, but there is a reason we retire articles and that is to remove them from the knowledge base. They should never return in results by users.

No, I agree with this one, also.   I'd love that BR to be included baseline - and perhaps some logic that also kicks in if someone decides to click "active" on a retired article.   A warning it's being brought out of retirement?

[brianf]

Dave Smith wrote:

To me, not setting the active flag to false on retirement is an oversight. Or not including default rules to not return a retired article in search results. Others may disagree, but there is a reason we retire articles and that is to remove them from the knowledge base. They should never return in results by users.
No, I agree with this one, also. I'd love that BR to be included baseline - and perhaps some logic that also kicks in if someone decides to click "active" on a retired article. A warning it's being brought out of retirement?

Actually, because of this rule, if I change workflow back to Published, it is still active=false. So I need a new rule that allows me to set the workflow to Published and it change the flag to active.   This is not a huge issue, the retired to published workflow is rare, but takes two steps.

[brianf]

Dave Smith wrote:

To me, not setting the active flag to false on retirement is an oversight. Or not including default rules to not return a retired article in search results. Others may disagree, but there is a reason we retire articles and that is to remove them from the knowledge base. They should never return in results by users.
No, I agree with this one, also. I'd love that BR to be included baseline - and perhaps some logic that also kicks in if someone decides to click "active" on a retired article. A warning it's being brought out of retirement?

Addendum, I would not let anyone have permission to either make an article active or change its workflow from Retired.