Permanently deleting an article

You cannot delete an article directly. Archiving is not the gentler alternative to deleting, it is the step before it.

You cannot delete an article directly. Archiving is not the gentler alternative to deleting, it is the step before it: to remove an article from your knowledge base you archive it, and you can then permanently delete anything you have archived.

Delete an archived article

1. In Knowledge, click Manage articles in the sidebar.
2. Click Archived articles.
3. Find and select the archived article. You can browse, search or filter.
4. In the archived article, click Delete, then OK to confirm.

For more than one at a time, there is a bulk update route. For an irreversible action, doing them one at a time is not the slow way, it is the safe one.

What deleting removes

The article and every translation attached to it. On a knowledge base that runs in more than one language, that is the part worth pausing over: deleting the English article takes the Dutch one with it.

Zendesk states the consequence plainly: a deleted article cannot be restored by anyone, including Zendesk. Every link pointing at it, from your macros, your emails, other articles and search results, now leads nowhere.

Only a Knowledge admin can do it

An agent can archive an article but cannot delete one. That split is deliberate and worth keeping: it means the reversible action is available to the people doing the work, and the irreversible one is not.

Archiving usually is the answer

An archived article is out of the knowledge base and still there. You can read what it said and you can restore it, which covers what people want: the article should not be found any more, and the knowledge should not be lost.

Two things about restoring, so it does not surprise you. The article comes back as a draft or work in progress rather than published, in the section it was published in before. And its Managed by field resets to Admins, so if a particular team used to manage it, set that again.

When deleting is right

• A duplicate created by mistake.
• A test article.
• Something that should never have been published, where keeping it is the risk.

All three are cases where nothing links to it and nothing is lost. Anything else is tidying, and tidying is not worth an irreversible action.

Check what links to it first

Macros are the ones people forget. An agent sends the same link every day, and it stops working without anyone telling you. Where an article had traffic from search, point the old address at whatever replaced it rather than letting people arrive at nothing.

See also

• Archiving and restoring an article
• Can I redirect traffic from deleted articles
• Inserting and managing links