Follow article feature to notify users of article content updates
我t 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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Official comment
This is currently in our backlog and awaiting prioritization, we understand the product requirements from you all it's just a matter of priority vs. other features we're working on like URL redirects, improvements to our article editor and other infrastructure work. We have this scheduled for prioritization in Q4 and we can update the thread once we know more.
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Yes, that would be great. How do you currently notify users when you update an article?
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We ask our users to Follow the Section. When we post a new article an email is generated to users Following that Section. If we do a major update, we temporarily remove the article by making it a draft item, Update the article and then make our edits, remove the draft checkmark and Update. This is now seen as a new article and out goes an email...
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Cool. Good to know that a notification can be sent to followers once an existing article is updated!
我s there an option to set up what to Follow at the Home page in general (i.e categories and not go through each one-by-one) and/ or Follow All?
Thanks.
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@Jose - Unfortunately the option currently available is to Follow a Section. As the Admin for my Help Center I follow all Sections so that when an author adds an article I get a notification. If you permit Comments to your articles, you can follow the article comments.
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So... it's just the Admin who can follow all. I see. Thanks, Frank.
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@Jose - No any user can Follow any or all Sections.
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@Frank - Sorry. Im new to this... I initially meant to ask was - is there an option for a regular user to select and follow all in one go, without going through each category or article and clicking follow? A 'Follow All' button, if you will...
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No that option does not yet exist. You can only Follow from a Section, each on individually. Sorry...
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No worries.
Thank you, Frank. Cheers! :)
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Are there any plans to update the 'Follow' feature to include notifications when an article changes?
Could I get an update on this?
The workaround (setting the article to draft, editing, and then removing the draft flag) would work for our content providers, it's not likely that I'll be able to get our content readers to follow the section. Our audience is large, global, and we are hiring all the time.
They will see the 'follow' button, and click on it at the article level, expecting to see updates, like I did when I first saw it.... :)
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Hi,
One crucial thing we need to implement before we can send out notifications on articles is the ability for the article editor to decide if they want to notify followers of their changes. Sometimes an article is merely updated to fix spelling errors and in those cases we don't want to inform all users of an update - since there really isn't one.
Adding that feature is not on our immediate roadmap. While we agree that it's something we should add at some point, we are simply focusing on other things right now. Our main objective is to continue building out our知识管理测试app so it supports editing content and gives more powerful filters. Once that is released we will revisit other features like notifying customers of updates to an article.
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@Christian - you are SO right, we don't want notifications going out EVERY time. we would like more control over that. You nailed it.
Thanks
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For me, the option of choosing whether to send a notification or not when I update an article is a nice to have, not strictly necessary.
That said, it would be nice to have. :)
We've come up with a work-around until we have this feature - we're going to ask our content creators to add a comment to the article, briefly summarizing what changed. This will trigger the notification, and give readers a general idea of what to look for.
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That's a great idea Patty!
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Hi Christian,
我would just like to add a +1 to this feature request.
Anyone who see's a "follow" button on an article assumes that it will follow for any page updates (not just comments which aren't really used very often on KB articles)
Kind Regards,
Tom Bradley
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+1. we sync our bugs to the help center and we need a way to notify a customer when the status of the bug changes.
its an automatic process so we can't put the article in draft and republish
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+1. We have an article on our 'download' page/section that contains references to the dowload locations for our new releases.
Everytime we have a new release, we update the article with the new download locations (and the rest of the content of the article stays the same).
Our customers want to get notified everytime we have released a new version, and the follow feature would address that requirement perfectly.
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+1 on this request
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+1 to add notification when updating Article itself (not just for comments).
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Hi all,
我've been reading your feedback and wanted to reach out with a few questions.
What types of users do you believe need to get notifications on article changes? And is it only for certain content that you could imagine notifications making sense or is it for all content?
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Any user who decided to follow the article should get the notification upon article's update. Simple as that.
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Hi Antonio,
Could you elaborate a bit on who would decide to get article updates? Who are those types of users in your Help Center?
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如果用户遵循一篇文章和评论,then I like the idea of adding a comment guiding them on what exactly has been updated. A blanket notification of "Such and such an article has been updated..." would be less user friendly.
We are still struggling to get users to follow sections for new articles. My problem would be to get them to follow the article in the first place.
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Hi Merav,
That's super interesting. So why do you want to get them to follow the article and why do you think it's so hard to get them to do it? What do you get out of them following articles? Also is this for specific articles or is it for all articles?
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As you can see in our help center (support.thron.com) our articles describes specific features of our product, and provide detailed guidelines for partners an integrators. Hence, any customer/partner interested into a specific feature or guideline described in the article explicitly decides to "Follow" the article because he expects that if any change is made on that specific feature/guideline, he would be notified of such change.
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@Christian
We were also interested in this feature and like Antonio, we try to get people to follow the article.
在我们的例子中,使用了HC bug数据库。我f a customer reports a bug, we raise it in the HC and ask them to follow it. That way we don’t have to keep Zendesk tickets open for months. Once the bug state changes, (eg someone starts working on it, or it gets assigned to a product release), we update the article and anyone who had the bug and subscribed, gets notification. It's out way of trying to keep customers informed
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+1 to Antonio and Lester’s comments.
We desperately need this feature. It is the #1 request from our users. We have disabled comments on our Help Center for very specific reasons, therefore users cannot currently follow an article on our site. We have many specifications and guideline articles throughout our entire knowledge base that service different partners worldwide. Updates are often made to one spec document or article and we need to notify a specific set of users to that change.
Currently we ask our users to "follow" a section using the workaround that Frank mentioned on 01/08/2015. Unfortunately, this is less than ideal.Once they follow a section, they get pinged when there are new or updates to any articles in that section, some which do not apply to them causing a lot of unnecessary noise.
Simply adding the ability for us to either “update” an article or“update and notify” to ping subscriberswould be an excellent enhancement.
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A user should be able to follow an article and have the option of being notified of changes as an opt-in like a mailing list.
As the publisher of the article, you should then be able to notify users as an option as well that way if the change is significant rather say a typo the follows to get the notification.
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+1
When we make updates to our products, we have to update the training and KB collateral - which I'm sure Zendesk did too with the recent logo and UX updates. We don't want to post new articles, we just want to update the instructions with the corrected screenshots, and hopefully our users who subscribe to "Article updates" would get an alert that this occurred.
Pleasesign into leave a comment.
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