Maddy Bloomer

Hi @..., thanks for your response! The experience you're describing is exactly how it used to be, which was supposedly unintended in the first place, according to the support agent I spoke with. Thankfully, after several (frankly demanding) emails to the agent, this issue was further investigated and fixed as of a few weeks ago. Very pleased that the experience was updated to work as it did previously, as it's much more accommodating to my workflow (and I'm sure many others')!

Hi @..., thanks for confirming that you experienced the same change in behavior and the general timeframe in which this happened! I know there are definitely some workarounds to this issue, but it's still time-consuming and frustrating that we have to use workarounds when they could update the UX to reflect the previous, more user-friendly experience.

Again, I'll admit that I should have contacted their Support team when I first noticed this issue, but I had lost confidence in their ability to respond in a timely manner. It looks like that has since changed, so if you could open a ticket with them and confirm that the UX was updated to be less user-friendly, I'd appreciate it!

If enough people reach out about this issue, it may help convince them that this is a bug worth prioritizing. (If you do open a ticket, not sure if it's worth including, but it may be good to mention this post and my original ticket #6784982 for context.)

For those of you who have been editing help articles for more than six months, I'd like to know if you've noticed a change in behavior.

Up until a few months ago, when I went to select a specific article for a hyperlink, the article options would display in the order they were published (the most recently published articles would appear at the top of the list). Now, it seems that they display in no particular chronological order. I was disappointed when I first noticed this change in experience, but it has grown more frustrating over the months, as it has proved to be a fairly time-consuming task to have to repeatedly type out the article name when I used to be able to select it from the top of the list.

I reached out to Zendesk Support about this and was told that the current experience is intended—that the articles are supposed to populate based on the article's latest timestamp, in which those that were most recently updated would appear at the very bottom of the list—and that this experience hadn't been updated "in awhile".

I am 100% certain that the logic was the exact opposite just a few months ago, and it makes zero sense to me as to why they would intend for the most recently published/updated articles to appear at the bottom of the list. Even then, though, what they claim to be intended isn't even what I'm experiencing. I listed out the first 15 articles that display in the list, and they are clearly not in chronological order.

I find it hard to believe that no one else 1) is negatively impacted by this change in behavior, and 2) has even noticed this change in behavior (but I wouldn't be too surprised discovering that not many people have opened support tickets about this, as I have went months without an initial response for previous tickets, so now generally avoid submitting new ones). So, if you have noticed this change and are negatively impacted by it, will you please open a support ticket with Zendesk asking them to further investigate and fix this? TIA!

Also, here are the replication steps for anyone who is confused by my description:

1. When editing an article, select the Insert/edit link icon.
2. Select the ‘Help Center article’ tab.
3. Notice that the populated articles are in no particular order.

I'm sure there are a number of solutions that could be implemented to address the issue of losing edits in Guide, so I'm going to provide context of what I've experienced and propose a few solutions that I think could improve the experience.

My most recent issue: After making an hour's worth of changes to an existing article, I lost all of those changes. My power went out briefly and, concerned that I’d lose my work, I selected the source code button so that I could copy the current state of the article and paste it later if needed. Instead of an error pop-up (or literally any other experience), I got a full page error that gave me the exact experience I was attempting to avoid. There was no way to go back to my changes.

In past instances, I’ve lost hours upon hours of hard work after accidentally triggering the Back or Refresh button in my Firefox browser or with my Mac’s trackpad, as well as after updating table properties within the Guide editor, which triggered another full-page error and caused me to lose everything.

Here are a couple of enhancements that I know would drastically improve the editing experience and prevent this issue from occurring:

• Implement a "drafting" mode or an "auto-save" functionality so that refreshing the page doesn't lose all unsaved work
• Implement a pop-up dialog when an error occurs, which would allow users to exit the dialog and return to editing the article

Please fix this terrible UX. I know I'm not the only one who has experienced the same overwhelming frustration of this problem.

Seven years later... Can someone from Zendesk please confirm whether a more user-friendly table (particularly aimed at improving formatting flexibility) is at least on the roadmap?

The CSS others have offered is not a viable workaround because not all tables within our Help Center warrant the same content, thus require different margin sizes and what not. I have turned to creating tables in Microsoft Word and including screenshots of those tables within our help articles, which is a huge limitation since users cannot use < Ctrl + F > to search for specific content within a table.

This is an enormous pain point, and obviously has been one for years now. Please offer a solution.

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.