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Follow article feature to notify users of article content updates



Posted Oct 22, 2014

It would be great if users who follow an article are also notified when an article is updated. Currently it only notifies the user if a new comment is made. 


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127 comments

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Heather Rommel

Zendesk LuminaryThe Product Manager Whisperer - 2021Community Moderator

(One more thing...)

Regarding how it is hard to get customers to follow articles... That would be because for some reason a customer has to sign up to follow articles section by section and can't sign up for an entire category. 

I don't know about other Zendesk customers here, but we have multiple sections within a category and while we do like the ability for our customers to narrow down their interests, why is all the control (permissions too!) at the section level and not the category and/or the article level?

Thanks,

Heather

 

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Has this feature been revisted?  If an important article is updated and someone clicked on the Follow button, is that user notified that a change was made?

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Hi Mary (and all),

No this is not currently available. We would have to add in the ability to specify if you wanted an update to go out. If you're only changing a few spelling mistakes, you probably don't want to inform your users of changes.

It's not something we're working on at the moment. We understand the need, but we are simply focusing on other features right now.

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We would really like this feature implemented, even if every time a change is made, all who follow are updated.

Thanks,

Dana

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+1  for the option to notify following users of an edit, via email.

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Hi Scott (and Dana),

I would love to know more about your use case. Who are you trying to target with these notifications? What content do you expect that people follow and want updates to?

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Hi Christian,

I am Dana's boss and she was speaking for me most likely.

My use case is knowing when a client facing article has an update, and my team knows, so we're all aligned on what changes are being made to the external facing help center.  Right now, someone on my team can make a change to a whole section of an article, and I'd never know about it.  I'd like to know about it.

Below is a screenshot of how a similar knowledge management application handles notifications for watchers, when articles are changed or have edits.

 

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Is there a way in the future to add version control on articles?  The reason for this is I want to be able to track changes over time and be able to edit an article without publishing it until all changes are made.  Right now, if I edit the article, the only way to keep the old one published is to publish the new changes when I save.  It would be nice to have an Edit vs Publish status.  There are use cases to keep an article in Edit mode yet keep the previous version published.  Example a monthly newsletter, or new version info, etc.

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Jimmy and Mary,

It sounds like both your use cases are internal. It's not to inform end-users of changes, it's so that you (and your team) can keep track of changes made? We have features coming that might help alleviate this problem by showing all events that happen to your articles and also showing revisions of articles, with specific changes to body content and title (similar to Jimmy's screenshot). These events would not be end-user facing, so do you believe that it still helps in alleviating the problem? 

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Will this feature allow the previous version (V1) to stay published and the newest version (V2) to stay in edit mode?  Then, that helps us.  If I press the Save button on the new version (V2) and it auto overwrites the older published version (V1), then that is a problem.  We should only publish when we are ready to publish, not because we want to retain changes.  Some of our changes come in over time and we don't want to publish them until all changes come in.  We need to be able to collect changes on the newest version without publishing.

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@Christian, I believe that helps our use case.  Thanks.

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@Christian. We want to notify customer end users when specific articles are updated; user guides, version docs, release notes, etc. It would be the exception, not the norm.

Scott

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+1 for this feature. In the first order, we would like to have it implemented for API calls, HC GUI control interface might be implemented later.

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Likewise, it would be helpful if an article that is updated sends an email notification to the author (as someone might have modified the article)

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This is a very important feature.

Just as an example - our system sends messages to our clients servers, which have to whitelist our IPs so the messages get through.

Once in a while we update the IPs and unless we notify clients manually about the changes their messages get lost.

We strongly support the feature request that allows sending emails to all followers when the article admin decides, and not with every update that may be small and insignificant.

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+1 for this as well.

We put our documentation online, and whenever we add something new to our APIs, we usually updated existing articles, and would really like to notify our end-users with these additions, as the majority of our changes are brought to us directly from our customers, so it's highly relevant.

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+1 for me too. like others mentioned here we are putting documentation online.  If they follow it, they should get content update notification. 

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Please add me to the request list. Any updates on if something like this may be implemented?

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Nicole Saunders

Zendesk Community Manager

No updates at this time, though the product team is aware of the request.

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+1 for notifying end-users of content changes. We agree the editor should be able to set whether such notification is sent, on a per-article basis.

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+1 seeing if there is an update on this? Notifying subscribed end-users of content changes would be so incredibly helpful! 

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Hello, any updates on this feature?

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+1 .. I am also interested to add a follow button that notifies when articles are updated.

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Olá, tenho alguns artigos em específico, que são atualizações. Os nossos clientes, são convidados a receber este artigo por e-mail. O que serve, serve para os comentários e não é útil para o artigo. A pedido de atualizações do endereço interno?

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To Zendesk developer:

Getting notified for updated articles is a useful feature for many types of articles.

There's only one concern that what if you are just editing a typo! you want your user get notified?

I don't want it for our KB, But there's a solution for this!

If the articles have an option for version control, then if the author is fixing a spelling issue, won't change the version, however, if there's a big change to the article's content, then they can modify the version, and the end users can get notified, which is what exactly the users are looking for if they are following an article!

 

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+1 for upgrading this feature to include a notification service when articles are updated. We use articles to write product releases, so the feature would be very valuable in terms of automating a few steps and add more value to our helpcenter in general.

We are also working with statuspage.io, and when we write a post there, we can choose if we want the update to be pushed to subscribers from ticking a box. Pretty simple feature to integrate and to control which content will be pushed out. Regarding the above comment, changing an insignificant thing like a typo, would not be pushed as a change to the subscribers, because the author would then simply avoid ticking off the box "Notify subscribers of changes made to this article"

Zendesk, is this on your roadmap? We would reconsider using the platform for our product releases, which would be a huge shame.

 

Thank you!

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I think a checkbox on each article: "Notify Author" would be a great option as you can determine whether or not the article change is significant enough to notify someone.   

Also, if article classification settings are modified, there should be a way to secure those settings and also list those changes in the article revision UI.  

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Hello, is there any update on when this feature will be added? It seems that there's a good demand from customer for this feature. It's really important for our users to be notified when an article they are following has been updated.

Thank you.

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+1 vote for the option to receive an email notification whenever a followed section or article has been updated - with the author's option to enable/disable the notification for any given update.

We provide our software release notes to our clients on our HD and really want an automated way to notify our clients that the updates are available.  The workaround to unpublish and republish the article with each update is clunky.

Please consider moving this feature up in your product roadmap.

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I was testing the 'Follow' feature but it does not seem to send email to users after I re-published an article. Can anyone provide a link to a good guide I can use to setup article so that users who 'Follow' my article will receive emails after I upload an attachment?

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