Question
Why is the Last edited date, displayed in the Help Center article editor, different from the last updated date that is displayed to the end-users in the Help Center?
Answer
The reason for the discrepancy between these two dates is as follows:
The Last edited date, returned within the editor, reflects the last time the content of the article was updated.
The Last updated date, outside the editor (shown to end-users), is given by the helper date article.updated_at.
The date article.updated_at helper reflects the last change to the article's meta-data, which includes new comments and up/down votes (both of which can be done by other end-users). Similarly, if you have localized content, any comment or vote on a translated article will also affect the last updated date shown to end-users for all translations as well as the source article.
If you would like end-users to only see updates to the content of the article, and not the meta-data, a Guide Admin can replace the helper date article.updated_at with date article.edited_at. This adjustment will allow end-users to see the same updated information as an agent will see within the article editor. For more information on these objects, see Help Center Template Objects.
21 Comments
Why would the `updated_at` value reflect votes and comments? As a Help Center manager, I would want my customers aware of an update to the article, not a vote made by a Community member. Is there a way to show to an end user that an article's content has been updated?
+1 what Brad said
Hello, Brand and Pedro,
Essentially, updated_at is a database field that reflects the last time the record was touched in the database. Which doesn't just mean that it's when a body or other attributes of the article were updated.
Unfortunately, this isn't how most customers think about it or interpret the name of the field. We are working on a more customer friendly last_edited_at type of field that would behave more like what you are expecting. However, we do not have a timeline on that just yet.
I agree with Brad. It is a confusing implementation and should be changed soon. Can we please get a timeline on this change?
Hi Ashish! Has Ricardo pointed out, we don't have a timeline on this change yet. But we'll definitely let you know when we're closer to knowing when it'll be ready!
Which does the "sort by last edited" column in the "Manage Articles" list use? I have articles in the editor view that have been edited recently, but in the list they show as being last edited over 2 years ago.
Hey Cody!
Quick point of clarification: what actions are you considering to be an edit? Just changes to the article itself?
Agree with Brad. Any updates on change of implementation or a workaround that can be used?
Hi Liri -
We do not have any implementation updates on this at this time, though I can assure you our team is asking for the same thing. :) I'll leave it to the community to offer up a workaround, hopefully someone has figured one out!
この仕様のため、当社には実際にお客様より問い合わせがありました。「日時が急に変わってびっくりした。おかしいと思う」という内容です。
この機能は誰のためのものですか？開発者のためのものですか？
このような、お客様にとって直接重要ではない内容で1件の問い合わせが生じたということは、同じ疑問を思われた方が30人以上いて、弊社のサポートクオリティに一抹の疑問を持たれたと考えています。
即時改善の対応を要求します。
+1 on changing the behavior, it's quite confusing now. Thanks!
Hi all -
I encourage you to share your detailed feedback on this in the Product Feedback topic in the Community, where our Product teams are much more likely to see it. If you haven't posted there before, I encourage you to read the guidelines on how to write an effective Product Feedback post first.
Thanks for participating in the Zendesk Community!
Hello!
+1 for this idea! Getting a true "last updated" date would be a great feature.
Hey Evan and Mikhail -
We just recently added an "edited at" property, which shows the last date the article was edited, rather than the last time it was voted or commented on. We've actually applied it to our own knowledge base as of this week.
Here are the Release Notes that cover it, and here is the API information. Let us know if you have additional questions!
Hi,
I got just a bit more info about edited_at, plus a couple more links for you from our HC API docs.
It's a property of the Article and Article Comment objects in the Curlybars templating language and in the HC API.
Curlybars example: {{article.edited_at}}
See:
Is there any update on this issue being resolved? I can't imagine how it makes sense to show the end user the last date an end user interacted with the article, rather than the last date substantial changes were made.
Does anyone know if this would have a negative effect on SEO? What date would Google's crawlers pick up when looking for relevant/updated content?
Hi Oscar,
We don't have all of the details on the ways that Google's indexing operates, but to the best of our product team's knowledge, our understanding is that the crawlers would favor the
lastmodattribute in the sitemap for an article:Hey all,
As a single admin/author/editor I rely a lot on the users in my company to point things out and we discovered this today. Fortunately it's a relatively easy fix that involves simply making a minor change to one variable. You may need to change it in several places depending on where you want your users to see it.
In our case, we want to reflect the last time article content was updated when users do a search of our Guide articles. As the OP indicates, the date being returned was the last time something had happened to the article whether it was an edit or not. In my case I had to simply change one line in the search_results.hbs code in the Guide template:
(Image reflects the line after the change).
As indicated in the OP, this will probably have a variable/token like {{date created_at timeago=true}} or {{date updated_at timeago=true}}. To find out what your search results are returning:
Changing that token or variable to "edited_at" will correctly reflect the last time you made an update and saved the article when users search your knowledge base articles.
Hello Kenneth Nuckols,
Thanks for sharing this workaround in the community! Would you be willing to share this with other users in our User Tips & Tricks section of the community?
Best regards.
Hey Devan - Community Manager I saw your note and I posted the tip as requested.
Thanks for the suggestion!
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