Question
What does Follow mean in Guide or Gather?
Answer
For Zendesk Guide and Gather, Follow means subscribe. When you follow a community post, topic, article, or section, you'll get an email notification when certain updates are made to it:
- For articles/posts, you will receive email notifications for new articles/posts only in the section or topic.
- For articles/posts and comments, you will receive email notifications for all new articles/posts in the section or topic and any new comments.
- You will receive email notifications for any new comments on the article or post; however, you will not receive notifications when the content in the article or post is edited or updated.
Tip: To notify followers of updates within the body of the article, add a comment to the article informing followers that there is new content.
For more information about the following content in the Help Center and the community to get notifications, see the article: Help Center guide for end users.
For more related content, see this article: How can I remove the Follow button on my Help Center articles?
42 comments
Gabriel Manlapig
Yes, you have understood this correctly! If you follow a section you will get an email for when new articles are added. And when you follow an article, you should only expect to receive an email notification when a comment is posted on the article. You will not receive an update when the article is updated.
I hope this answers your question. Thank you!
-2
Rachel Martin
How can I remove the follow button on Guide content authors? If you click on the author as an end user on an article you get taken to their 'profile' page with a 'Follow' button. How do I remove this?
0
Christine
To completely remove the subscribe helper from your help center you can remove the script within the article page's code.
0
Jane M Langschied
Would love to be able to have a link/section for agents on the home page so that they can more easily view the articles they have followed. Is there code I could add or an update coming?
0
Gab
That's a customization that can be done with your Help Center theme. However, I'm afraid we cannot build custom code for your Guide or help you troubleshoot your customized code.
Before you can add a link to the home page of your help center, please note that you will need to add custom HTML to your help center theme, which can be added to your page template under the Header page (header.hbs) tab.
We do have the following resources available to help your developers regarding Guide customization:
Customizing your Help Center theme
Help Center API Helpers
Help Center API Advanced Helpers
0
Jeff Bistrong
It seems that the email that is generated when the new comment is added is vague and doesn't give a lot of information in the subject. Is there a way to customize the email that is sent out?
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Volodymyr Radchenko
Thanks a lot for your contribution to the topic.
Also, to disable "Follow" for categories/sections, check for {{subscribe}} in the category or section_page.hbs.
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Kelli Cain
There are Follow buttons at the Topic level as well as Post level - If a user clicks Follow at the Topic level, will they receive notifications each time someone posts or comments anywhere within that Topic?
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Audrey Ann Cipriano
Hi Kelli Cain that is correct!
When end user follows a topic, they will have the option to either receive notifications for New posts or New posts AND comments :)
Hope this helps!
1
Kelli Cain
@Audrey it does help! Thank you!
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Camila
So, if my users follow a section they will get an email for when new articles are added.
If they follow an article, they should only expect to receive an email notification when a comment is posted on the article. They won't receive an update when the article is updated, and to circumvent this all I can do is post a comment each time? I guess this means I need to tell them to select “Post and comments”, right?
But then I wonder, what is the purpose of solely following an article?
0
Karl Dominic Guerra
Thank you for your feedback here. Please take a look at this post: Follow article feature to notify users of article content updates
Our product team has confirmed that the May 2023 update is still the most up to date, and this feature is not being prioritized at this moment.
As you're already aware, the standing workaround at the moment is to comment on the article any time changes are made so that people who follow it get a notification. We understand this is highly manual and not very scalable, but we'll share updates should this be changed moving forward.
Thanks again for your feedback!
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