If you want to remove an article from your knowledge base, you must archive the article. You can then permanently delete any articles you have archived. When you delete an article, it is permanently deleted and cannot be restored by anyone, including Zendesk.
If you need to delete multiple articles at once, see Updating knowledge base articles in bulk.
You must be a Guide admin to delete articles.
To delete an article
- In Guide, click the Manage articles (
) icon in the sidebar. The Lists tab opens by default.
- Click Archived articles.
A list of your archived articles appears.
- Find and select an archived article from your list.
You can browse, search, or add a filter to find a specific article. If the article you want to delete has not been archived, and does not appear in the archived list, you must first you must first archive the article.
- In the archived article, click Delete, then click OK to confirm the
deletion.
The article is permanently deleted and cannot be restored by anyone, including Zendesk.
20 Comments
When an article is deleted are any inline article attachments also deleted?
Hi Chris,
All inline article attachments will also be deleted and will not be accessible anymore. When you access the image links, it will redirect you to an error page.
Can we permanently delete articles through the API?
Hi Byron,
I checked for solution using the API but it would only archive the article the same way as it would from the users interface. Unfortunately there is no option to permanently delete articles at the moment. We do have a article "Deleting an article from your knowledge base" , I hope that help.
I followed the steps above, no error messages on delete. But when I go back to my home page of the Guide, they are still listed. When I click on them, they say they are gone? When does the link get removed. I did refresh on my browser, no change.
Hey Greg,
It sounds like these links may be hard-coded into your Guide theme. Is your Guide page public by chance so I could take a look? If so, feel free to send me a link as well as the title of the article that should no longer be showing up on your end.
Thanks!
I'm having the same problem still showing even though I have archive and deleted
https://dreamhelp.providence.org/hc/en-us/categories/360001766894-Knowledgebase
test article 2 and test article should not be showing anymore
I have closed browser and clear cache too
Please advice?
Rosemary
Hey Rosemary,
I'm actually being directed to your login page when I try navigating to the link you provided.
If you've deleted the article, what happens when you try clicking on the title to open it up?
Does it take you to the article page or does it error out?
Let me know!
Well it managed to fix itself, maybe cleared out cache or something? I have another question, if I want to restore an "earlier/previous" version how do I do it?
Thanks,
Rosemary
Hey Rosemary,
If you're trying to restore an archived article you can use the following article: Viewing and restoring archived articles
To restore a previous version of an article you can use these instructions: Viewing article revisions and restoring a previous version (Guide Professional and Enterprise)
Hope this helps!
I am having the same issue as @Greg: "I followed the steps above, no error messages on delete. But when I go back to my home page of the Guide, they are still listed. When I click on them, they say they are gone? When does the link get removed. I did refresh on my browser, no change." I do want to mention that I imported the Role_Theme from zendesklabs/themes Github repo, so maybe that's part of my issue?
Since nothing is public, I've attached an image below to show you what I'm seeing on my end.
I properly deleted my "Test" article with no errors or issues, so the "Accounts & Authentication" section is completely empty... This means that "Accounts & Authentication" shouldn't even be visible in the Help Center at all, yet it's somehow visible and displaying a deleted link. *Note: this occurs when in Preview role: End-user. The "Test" link does NOT display when in Preview role: Manager. The "Self-Service" category itself is not visible to Anonymous, and Agents can't see it because it's empty, so I'm not sure what's going on within those preview roles.
*Edit: Wanted to add one more image to show the html displayed by Google Chrome's inspect element:
I tried a hard refresh, but the issue persists. Please advise.
My comment above says "pending approval". I think that writing "H3llo" may have triggered the content moderation tool... Just want to make sure it gets looked at.
Thanks for letting us know, Abigail. I approved the comment.
Hey Abigail,
If the article is still showing even after you've permanently deleted the article then the theme is most likely the issue here.
I did some testing in my own account with the standard Copenhagen theme and the article was immediately removed after I refreshed my browser. It may be worth previewing the Copenhagen theme to see if the article still shows on your end. See Previewing your Help Center theme for more information.
Otherwise, you'll want to have your developers take a look at your theme to see where the issue is coming from there.
I hope this points you in the right direction!
@Brett Just wanted to give an update.
The issue resolved itself over night! The"Accounts & Authentication" section is no longer visible, nor displaying a deleted link. It seems like there's just some lag time between the delete event and the invisibility/link-deletion trigger.
Thanks for taking a look!
That's awesome to hear Abigail :)
Appreciate the update!
I have followed the steps above to fully delete an Article that offered out of date details to our customers.
How does someone delete the attachment of an article? Is this advice inaccurate?
This article included a PDF manual, that is now out of date and requires the download link to it to stop functioning. Following the steps above, it says that upon deleting the article, attachments would be deleted as well - however, the direct download URL for the PDF attachment still functions.
Hi Ash,
I've created a ticket for you so that our team can look at this with you in more depth. You'll see an email with the ticket link.
I just selected 200 articles (30 at a time) and deleted them but the last 33 article will not delete. They could have been deleted during the process but they won't stop displaying within the Guide listing. When I select them to view\edit in Guide I get "Oops. There's nothing here." I've clear browser cache, reopen Chrome in incognito mode and the article won't go away or allow me to change anything about them.
Others have note a similar issue do I have to wait a day until they are cleared out. Why is this happening since we have done this several times without an issue.
Hey Christopher! I'm sorry this is happening. Just to clarify, are the remaining 33 articles source articles in your source language? I have seen some weird behavior like this when an article only exists as a translation and not as source content.
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