Help Center Articles containing both internal and external content

I commented on another main comment thread about this topic and hope we can share some ideas of how to implement this critical feature; for public customer-facing articles to include critical context for the logged-in support agents helping customers through them.

UPDATE March 2025: There has been a new post opened at this page: Feature request: Ability to have an 'Internal' section (visible to Agents & Admins) at the bottom of articles that are only visible to Signed-In Users.

I suggest anyone still interested and still needing an Internal Note feature on Knowledge/Guide/Help Center articles to follow, vote, and share your use cases in the comments here and on the the new request post. If you find this via search later, please add your voice so we can show Zendesk that modern business customers truly need this feature to support our teams, agents, and customers. Thanks!

It's sad this hasn't been a priority since 2015, and still continues to be low priority. 

This seems like low hanging fruit from a development side with a huge value add for teams. It would help us to adopt KCS methodologies to better support our customers experiencing more complex issues. 

Our agents want to add links to tickets, JIRAs, and share notes about "gotchas" .  This is very important to us.  I've seen these requests for quite some time and am hoping that ZD can deliver a way to add internal notes to any article.

Guys, everything is rather helpful here, but everybody forgets about the actual accessibility of the content - "internal data" hidden with JS will still be available in Google indexing services moreover, if a customer Follows the article its updates are sent to their e-mail, and in plain text internals will be revealed.

So I want to ask ZenDesk development. There were requests about such functional changes to keep internal data internal at all angles since 2015 - haven't you come up with anything yet? Could you be more active?

Hey all!

Just to chime in on a more secure way for what Colin suggested, instead of hiding and showing alone, there's a way to remove element by class so it doesn't show at all, not even in Inspect. This way it can't be bypassed (or at least is incredibly more difficult to bypass if not impossible?).

In javascript:

// Remove or show div html based on role
if (HelpCenter.user.role=="end_user"){
const elements = document.getElementsByClassName('internal');
while(elements.length > 0){
elements[0].parentNode.removeChild(elements[0]);
}
}

if (HelpCenter.user.role=="anonymous"){
const elements = document.getElementsByClassName('internal');
while(elements.length > 0){
elements[0].parentNode.removeChild(elements[0]);
}
}

if (HelpCenter.user.role=="agent"){
var elements = document.getElementsByClassName('internal');
for (var i = 0; i < elements.length; i ++) {
elements[i].style.display = 'block';
}
}

if (HelpCenter.user.role=="manager"){
var elements = document.getElementsByClassName('internal');
for (var i = 0; i < elements.length; i ++) {
elements[i].style.display = 'block';
}
}

css code, hidden by default because there's a weird thing where when the page is refreshed the internal notes are displayed for everyone for a split second before the javascript removes it (puts a red outline and light red background so it stands out as being internal, as well as writes Internal Notes at the top of the box):

/* internal note styling */
.internal:before {
content:"Internal Notes \a";
font-size:22px;
color:red;
white-space: pre;
}
.internal {
background-color: #ffeeee;
border: 1px solid #ff0101;
border-radius: 5px;
text-align: left;
padding-top: 7px;
padding-bottom: 7px;
padding-left: 14px;
padding-right: 14px;
position: relative;
display: none;
}

Then put <div class="internal"> </div> around whatever needs to be internal.

This will hide internal notes by default, remove them from the HTML if the user is an End User or Anonymous, and change display to block if the user is an Agent or Manager. Internal notes can be used multiple times in the same article with this code. Hope this helps!

The precaution would be ensuring the "internal content" has a user group/segment assigned to it that is "agents & admins" or "admins" for example. 

Hi all, 

I would like to take this opportunity and ask to think about and share your thought on the security of the content. Do you have any concerns that accidentally some sensitive content could be exposed to an unintended audience, either if it's an admin mistake or a system mistake?  Any precautions that need to be put in place to prevent this from happening?

At the moment we do not have detailed plans for this feature, but it's on our radar.  

This would be useful to us!