You can create article verification rules to send reminders when articles need to be reviewed and verified, based on the criteria and interval you set. This helps ensure that your content doesn't become stale or out-of-date. For example, every three months you might want to review articles that have a specific label, appear in a certain category, or haven't been updated in a while.
An article verification rule is built with an article filter and a frequency. When articles meet the criteria and the interval based on a rule, email notifications are sent to the article owners for the affected articles, and the articles appear in the Needs Verification article list.
These articles are considered unverified, and remain so until someone verifies the articles. Article owners continue to receive email notifications twice a week for their articles that need verification.
You can create as many as 20 verification rules. You must be a Guide admin to create article verification rules.
You can duplicate an existing rule if you'd like your rule to be based on another rule.
To create an article verification rule
- In Guide, click the Settings icon (
) icon in the sidebar, then click Article
verification. - Click Add.
If the Add button is not available, then you have already created the maximum number of 20 rules. You can delete a rule if you want to add a new rule.
- Enter a Rule name.
- Select a Frequency for the reminder.
After the specified interval, an email notification is sent to the article owner and the articles appear in the Article Verification list.
- Select Filters to determine the group of articles for this rule.
As you select filter options, a list of affected articles appears below.
- Click Create.
The article owner receives email notification when articles are ready to be reviewed, based on a rule. You cannot change or add recipients to the notifications. The owner is the author by default, but you can change the article owner to another user or a group.
29 Comments
When an email verification is sent out - if there are multiple articles that need verified are they bunched together in one email or does the person get one email per one article?
Hi Morgan,
I just received an email today for article verification and it listed three articles and then had a +2 more articles at the end to indicate there are more. So it looks like one email gets sent.
Thanks!
Maggie
For the frequency, is the time reset after the email is sent out to the Knowledge Owner to verify the article(s) or after the article is verified?
For example, let's say I have a rule for all articles in a certain section to be reviewed every 3 months. Are those emails sent out every 3 months regardless of when the Owner verifies the article (i.e., Owner gets email to verify article, but doesn't verify article until 2 weeks later)? Is the next email sent out 3 months from the last email or 3 months from the 2 weeks after it was verified?
Hi Ryan,
The interval specified on the Frequency setting will be the time from the moment that you verify an article. Note that you will continue to receive weekly email notifications for articles that need verification. In your example, the article will be listed again on the email notification on unverified articles 3 months from the time the article was verified.
Thanks!
Gab Thanks for the explanation, Gab. I really appreciate it!
We just upgraded to Guide Enterprise, and immediately started getting a ton of emails about unverified articles. I think I stopped them (by removing all the default rules). However, before I set them up again, I would like to get the list under control. Almost every article in our Help Center is considered "unverified" now, and we do not have the time or the need to go through all of them.
My plan was to mark them all "verified" and then figure out a plan going forward. However, there are around 400 articles in each Help Center, and I only seem to be able to "mark as verified" 30 at a time. Please tell me I'm missing a shortcut?
Hello Marci Abraham,
Unfortunately, I do not believe you are missing a shortcut. On that note, if someone does have a shortcut I would be excited to learn it!
What I do, since our smallest help center is around 600 articles, I filter by category and do one area at a time, that way I can stop if I need to in order to handle other things without getting confused on what I have adjusted and what I have not.
Thank you, Morgan King! I appreciate the tip!
Maybe a silly question, but I can't figure out how to filter by category? Do you see something I don't?
Not silly! It took me a little to figure it out. You will click on "hierarchy".
LOL thank you! This is the third time today that I have said "this is really not intuitive" and I've been a Zendesk admin for like 9 years. I appreciate you taking time to help me!
Thanks for helping, Morgan! Glad you got things working, Marci!
I am curious about how the rules work. What do you mean when you say we can create up to 5 rules. We currently have well over 5 rules in our article verification section. Could you explain further what the limits are?
Hello Tajinnere,
I would love to find a solution to this question. I am able to create many more rules as well, but I'm wondering if they won't work or go in conflict if it exceeds the limit. I already flagged this article internally for clarification. We'll let you know once we have an update! :)
Erika Camille Sundian is there an update to the rule limit? Can you make more than 5?
Also, is there a limit to how many "filters" you can apply? Every time I add more than 24 filters, it says I cannot save the verification rule
Erika Camille Sundian Hi! I'm just following up on my previous comment.
Is there a limit to how many filters you can add to a verification rule?
Hi Ryan,
Sorry for the delay on this!
The maximum numbers of verification rules is 20.
Regarding how many filters you may apply to a rule: Each non-date filter will take up to 10 values. The date filters are limited to 2 values (to express a range).
Hope that helps! Thanks!
Is there a way to turn off the email? I don't want to get the email all the time but I want to have the rule so that I can check in on it and review the articles.
In this article, it says that article owners will receive weekly email reminders to verify articles; however, in our instance, reminders are going out twice per week for the same article - once Sunday at 6:00 PM CST and once Tuesday at 6:00 PM CST. Is there a reason this would be occurring?
Hey Ryan,
You don't have duplicate rules set up do you? Does this occur for every article verification rule you've set up?
I may need to create a ticket on your behalf so we can dig into this further.
Let me know!
Brett Bowser Thanks for the response! I don't believe I have duplicate rules set up. I've tested this in our sandbox environment as well to confirm, and I'm receiving two emails every week for the same articles (one Sunday and one Tuesday).
Thanks for the confirmation Ryan! I've created a ticket for you so we can look into this further with you.
Cheers!
Hi
I have a few questions around the notification email:
Hi Dawn,
For the first question, the email that gets sent out is an automatic email so there isn't a way to change the content.
For the second and third questions, the user doesn't need to be a guide admin, but the user does need to be a Light Agent or above with Guide access. You can view a user's Guide access in the Admin Center. Here's an example below.
Without access to Guide to edit articles, then I wouldn't expect they would see any articles listed since they don't have any Guide access.
Hope that helps!
Thanks,
Maggie
Question. We have 6000+ articles in our KB. Some are 4-5 years old. We want to set a default article review date to be 6 months. After that, each owner will set a 3, 6, or 12 month review. Will the initial email notification get sent to authors from:
Hello! I'm in charge of regular maintenance for my team's articles. We do bi-annual checks on articles with high views, zero views, and ones with multiple downvotes (we get our data through Power BI). Is there any way to automate this process through the verification rules on Zendesk? We recently got Guide Enterprise, so I'm still working my way around things haha. Thank you so much!
Hi Paul,
I tried to find an API endpoint that could have been used to automate the verification process for articles, but there does not seem to be one. I am afraid that there is no way to automate this workflow according to articles statistics at the moment.
However, you can use the API to modify the attributes of articles, and use the filters on the verification rules to only apply the rule to some of your articles, according to their statistics.
I hope this helps.
Hey Jean-Charles, thanks for your reply! I noticed that Content Cues allows you to see how many views a certain article gets. Is there any way to see how many views all articles get? That way, I'll be able to add labels based on high views for more frequent verification.
Thanks again!
Hi Paul,
Unfortunately, there is no way to see how many views all your articles are getting within Zendesk.
However, you can use our integration with Google Analytics to obtain those results.
I hope this helps.
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