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
Mary Paez
This is an issue for us. We update release notes articles on a bi-monthly basis. To get notifications, we have to create a new article in its place, copy everything over from previous releases and add the new release. Then we publish. The original article has to be archived. When we have many products, I have to do this for each product so users get notifies when they follow.
Would be nice if there is an option on each article that allows you to Notify followers (a checkbox) when that article is updated without having to keep creating new ones/archiving old ones.
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Michael Maoz
I think it is natural that followers of articles are notified when the articles a updated, what other use cases are for following an article?
We use articles to allow our customers to be updated with features in our pipeline, a customer who wants to know when a certain feature is released will follow the article and receive the notification.
Making this a complicated process (some here archive articles and create new ones instead..) makes this tool useless for this purpose..
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Kyle Paulson
I'd like to add my vote for this feature as well. A little disappointing to discover the article follow button was only for comments. Glad for the workarounds I found here but it's for sure makes it a bit more manual than I'd like
I would suggest that the follow button on articles be modified to produce a drop-down when pressed with option for: follow all, follow article updates, follow article comments
I would suggest that the follow button for sections be modified to produce a drop-down that when pressed has options for follow all, follow article adds, follow article updates, follow article comments.
If user selects all then all options are checked otherwise user can specify options by section and article as stated.
I think this makes most sense and would be simple to implement on existing UI with just a bit of backend dev.
Generally drop-down could appear below button and look like:
Let's get this done Zendesk. :-)
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Evan Nelson
Hello,
The request to add this feature was placed October 22, 2014. That's nearly 5 years ago.
Please add my vote for this feature request.
Use Case:
We like to update our clients with release notes on a weekly basis. The idea of having to create a new article for each release note is not attractive. I do not want ~50 articles added a year just for release notes.
Instead of creating many articles, we would prefer to have a single article for release notes and to update that on a weekly basis. Unfortunately, the ability to notify watchers after an article update is not available. Some of the work arounds mentioned here seem marginal at best. ZD users have been asking for this for so long, please add this feature.
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Chris Lowe
Hi Zendesk,
Add another plus one to this feature request.
We use guide for documenting instruction sets, it is critical that any changes are notified to our technician end users.
Please, please, please add the ability to optionally notify followers when a document is re-published.
thanks
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Katie Murray
Please add me to this request list as well. This is an urgent need for us.
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Hkerkdijk
Same here. You can add another one to the request list.
Common Zendesk, no reaction from your side for the last couple of years?
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Kyle Paulson
Thank you Hkerkdijk...you made me laugh. I've noticed several tickets like this that have languished for years without movement as well. I have been forming an idea to make an article about the negligence and post links on all the neglected articles to bring "a known bug" to the attention of Zendesk with the hopes that the evaluation process for feature requests gets fixed. This would also simplify things because we could all just follow that article ;-p
More seriously though it would help to have more transparency about what kind of traction is needed to get a feature request implemented around here...and if development resources are an issue, then maybe a ticket about negligence really would really help make that a topic of conversation behind the scenes as well.
That's my two cents!
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Hkerkdijk
Dear Kyle,
same here.
Or copy and paste this link to the 'Get help' chat with a request to investigate?
Best wishes,
Henri
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Won Lee
Add me to the request list as well! Thanks, Zendesk.
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Hkerkdijk
Since nobody from Zendesk is watching this anymore for the past couple of years, how do we get the message across?
I tried the 'Get help' function, but a bot isn't helping any.
Ideas?
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Nicole Saunders
Hi @... -
We are watching this thread. Is there a question we can answer for you?
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Kyle Paulson
Hi Nicole,
I have a very simple question.
What kind of traction is needed for this to get addressed by the end of next month?
Thanks for letting us know you are watching this article!
-Kyle
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Nicole Saunders
Hi Kyle et al -
Unless the product team comes back and tells us that this is already in development, it's not something that will be addressed by the end of next month. Product roadmaps are planned on a quarterly basis, usually several months ahead of time. So if it's not planned for development already, it wouldn't get done this quarter.
To give some explanation to how and why some requests stay active but not prioritized for several years, we receive several thousand unique requests every month, and can usually put a dozen or so on a roadmap in a given quarter. As you can imagine, this means that the product manager's job is one of ruthless prioritization. They have to balance improvements to current products with new innovations, and take many factors into account.
User feedback is one of the most important data points, but it's not the only one. They look at how many users are impacted, and how significant that impact is to their business (i.e. is something an urgent requirement or a nice to have) They also consider market factors, other things that have to be developed first to lay the groundwork for a given request, and future plans that may serve the need in lieu of the exact solution being requested. They also have to look at the direction of the market, what our competition is building, etc.
I realize that this request has been around for a long time, and ideally would have made it on to a roadmap by now, and so this answer may not be so satisfying. We know that our process with the feedback forums hasn't scaled over time - as our customer base has grown and our product line has expanded, we're getting a ton of feedback, and don't have a great way to put it all together, make sense of it, get it implemented, etc. There are currently thousands of active requests, the majority of which we can't prioritize in the immediate future.
We're looking at ways to change how we collect and act on your feedback, so that it's a better process for everyone involved. I know we've been saying that for a while, too, but we have a lot of folks we have to get on the same page about how we want to collect feedback, how we want to go about implementing it in our product, and how we communicate all of that back out to you. Progress is being made on that front, but we aren't there yet. Thank you for your patience.
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Kyle Paulson
Thank you for the explanation Nicole!
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Maddy Bloomer
I'd like to add my input for this RFE as well. Not only would a "Notify Watchers" feature be helpful, but it would also be nice if anonymous users could follow an article or section as well.
We are currently working toward SSO across our different platforms, but in the meantime, our customers will be visiting our Help Center as anonymous users. It would be extremely useful if a user could follow an article or a section anonymously and receive updates on our release notes, but it looks like this is only available to users that are signed in. A workaround for this is to notify users of updated release notes in our actual product and link to the latest article, but for all external stakeholders that are not in our application, they have to create an actual account, which is not ideal.
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Dylan Douglas
I'll add that a customer just reported this as "a bug" to us. We'd be interested in this feature also.
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Jesse
+1 to this request. We're having to hack around it by temporarily enabling comments and updating the thread then disabling them. We don't allow for comments for our use-case.
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Christy Lutz
Plus one to this feature.
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Mike McGuffie
and another +1!
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Joao Reis
+1 to this feature request.
Thanks, Zendesk.
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Kalle Windefalk
+1
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Jessalyn
This should ABSOLUTELY be a feature. The follow button is useless to us in its current format.
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Sinisa Zubic
+1
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Marc Binns
+1 This makes life much easier!
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Mary Paez
We have seen several tickets from customers who "follow" a particular article (eg: Release Notes or Webinar Knowledge Collection") that report they do not get notified when the article is updated. This is a feature that is important to our customers and therefore important to us!
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Katie Murray
Hi team, can we please have an update on this feature and if it is something you're planning?
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Mary Paez
Would like to see this feature as customers rely on it. We change article content often with new releases. A feature is updated and we need the customer to know that. So, when the article is updated, we want the customer who follows that article to be notified.
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Tracy Scobba
Yikes, Zendesk... This is just embarrassing. I had no idea the followers weren't notified when the article was updated. That's just silly.
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Jacqueline Lehr
Today I fielded yet another customer complaint that was escalated though sales to support to me about not receiving notfications for updates to an article that was important to them.
What a waste of everyone's time!
Please prioritoze this feature. Thanks!
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