Error: redaction failed

Redaction refuses most often because the conversation is still active, not because the ticket is old or closed.

Redaction refuses most often because the conversation is still active, not because the ticket is old or closed.

Symptoms: what the message says

Redaction failed – wait a moment, then try again

• Confirming a redaction returns the message above.
• It works on some tickets and not on others.
• Waiting and retrying, as the message suggests, changes nothing.

That last point matters. The wording invites you to try again, and where the cause is one of the settings below, trying again will fail every time.

The usual cause: the conversation is still live

Redaction is not allowed in an active messaging conversation. While the visitor is still in it, the content cannot be changed.

Two ways out: wait for the conversation to go inactive, or move the ticket to pending, on-hold or solved yourself and redact after that.

This is the first thing to check when the failure is on a chat or messaging ticket and the customer was recently in it.

Closed and archived tickets: it depends on the channel

The common assumption is that an old or closed ticket cannot be redacted at all. That is only half right, and which half depends on where the ticket came from.

So a failure on an old ticket tells you to look at the channel, not at the age.

Two settings that produce this from an unexpected direction

• "Anybody can submit tickets" is switched off. With that disabled, the Web Widget (Classic) cannot submit tickets, and this error is one of the ways that surfaces.
• A support address conflict, again in combination with the Web Widget (Classic).

Neither has anything obvious to do with redaction, which is why they cost people an afternoon.

Rule out your own browser and apps

1. Clear the browser cache and cookies, then try once more. See Clearing your cache and cookies.
2. Disable browser extensions one at a time to find a conflict.
3. Add ?noapps to the end of the ticket URL to load it without any Zendesk apps, and try there.

That last one applies beyond this error. It answers "is it an app?" in a few seconds without uninstalling anything.

If none of that applies

It can be a temporary fault, in which case the message means what it says. Tell us which ticket and which channel if it persists on a ticket that should be redactable by the rules above.

See also

• Redacting content from a ticket
• Redacting sensitive data from a ticket