Question
I created a report or dashboard to measure article statistics, but the article title is occasionally blank. Why am I seeing this?
Answer
Blank article titles occur if the article was deleted, archived, or unpublished.
Explore will continue reporting on how many views or ratings the deleted article received, but the title and other article information will not be displayed.
The blank article title value represents a consolidation of multiple articles into a single entity following their deletion. All associated data has been permanently removed, and identifying the original article titles will not be possible. This approach is designed to provide users with visibility into previously existing articles, which are represented as part of the blank article title value and included in the pre-built reports within Explore.
For information on removing these blank attributes from the report, see this article: Hiding rows and columns.
8 comments
Pedro Reis
It does not make sense to leave the field blank, you either show it or not!
At least an option, to choose to see, archived or unpublished articles on the list
15
Elle Tucker
We should be able to see the name of the article in explore even if the article is unpublished. We have one off issues that need to be published for a set amount of time and it's helpful to see how many views the received even after it's unpublished Is there a way to update the name within explore?
4
Costas Leontis
We definitely still need to be able to see the article title even after it's unpublished.. THIS IS IMPORTANT AND NEEDS TO GO TO YOUR DEVELOPERS FOR DISCOVERY ASAP. Thanks
2
Darenne
Your voices are very important to us. To improve our services, I’d recommend posting about this feature request and your use case on our product feedback discussion boards where our managers and developers discuss new features and workarounds with our community. The link for those boards can be found here.
0
Ivar Aaen
Until I found this article, I thought this was a bug that would be fixed at any time now.
In reporting the only information about archived articles is it's section, and in Guide there are no statistics on the archived articles.
This is an error that has to be fixed. Take a look at my example here:
Me: "As you can see there are 111 views of unknown article(s?) this week. All I know is that the articles are archived, that somebody in our company wrote it/them and that they were viewed 111 times."
Boss: "Why are there no information about those articles?"
Me: "It's Zendesk"
2
Rebecca
+1 to Ivar Aaen , I'm searching this as I just got out of a meeting where I had that exact conversation. An aggregate of all views from a group of Archived articles, with no other identifiable information, is not helpful and is causing more questions than answers.
We need to retain attributes, even if it's at least an article ID, so we can explain 100+ views on NULL values that are apparently from Archived articles. Please let us know if there is an update for this or where we can best post to get help for this specific issue? Thanks!
1
Nedialko Kondev
I've the same issue here. Our chief of Product keeps asking what are these blank spaces in the reports?
We've a ridiculous amount of views there:
1
Rebecca
Nedialko Kondev I spent a while with Support on this issue and was able to confirm the following info which I will share if it helps anyone. The blank line is a single consolidation of all articles, during the selected timeframe, that were either:
One other thing we found was that in the view in your screenshot, Article Engagement by Selected Attribute > “by Title”: if any articles happen to have identical titles, Zendesk Explore will combine their views/metrics in that table. It's very unhelpful for us, we would want metrics to stay associated with each unique article ID. Would like to hear more from Zendesk on these baffling issues.
0