PTC gatekeeping older articles

[JasonH]

CS7287 used to be visible and it detailed how to do a soft type change in 11.0, now when you visit it gives you this.

The 12.0 article for the changetypesql utility is CS368420 

We can't open support cases for anything less than 12.0 these days or it gets auto closed out, so here I am asking in the forum for PTC to stop gatekeeping older articles if you are going to auto close tickets and say go read the KB....which is what you are doing now.

Jason

[RomainGarcia]

Hi @JasonH, 

Thank you for raising this concern.  I am the knowledge manager responsible for support services content strategy.

I can guarantee that we have no rules or guidelines shared with support engineers to archive articles related to old releases.

In regards to CS7287, being flagged as "Internal", this article was having a disclaimer "This article, and its contents are intended for specific use case scenarios and may/will need to be modified depending on the environment and requirements, Please contact Technical Support should you require any assistance, or are experiencing any difficulties"

By misinterpreting the content of this article it could lead to severe data corruption and as we cannot provide assistance anymore, this article has been decided to be marked as "Internal" in 2020.

Our objective is to provide the most complete and comprehensive knowledge base in making sure that customers can use our content without risk. The environment stability of our customers is our utmost priority.

Thanks

Romain 

[TomU]

@RomainGarcia,

---

"This article, and its contents are intended for specific use case scenarios and may/will need to be modified depending on the environment and requirements..."

---

You could argue that this disclaimer probably applies to every single article in the entire knowledge base.  That should not be justification for hiding it.  Many of us build internal documentation around these knowledge base articles.  Once an article is public, it should stay available forever.  Just because it may no longer apply to the latest version, or is no longer the preferred or supported technique, does not mean it should be removed or hidden in the knowledge base.  The articles clearly state what version of the software they apply to.  If someone really wants they could add a disclaimer saying a particular technique is no longer recommend and reference the newer replacement article, but please, please, do not remove, hide, or purge old content.  Doing so makes it nearly impossible to understand old documentation we've created that depends on these articles.

See corresponding product idea here: https://community.ptc.com/t5/PTC-eSupport-Help-Ideas/Keep-Knowledge-Base-Articles-Forever/idi-p/642736

[RomainGarcia]

@TomU  I fully support this idea. Indeed, we don't have a clear procedure to handle this use case because we are leveraging article applicability. By default, we are not removing an old content because the way it is done in a new release is different. We either make it clear within the article that there are different ways per release and update the applicability or we create a different article applicable to the new release only. We either update or create a new one based on the article complexity.

Nevertheless, in some rare situations and for various reasons, we are discovering that the content of an article should remain internal . And indeed, for this use case, it's better to keep the article available to avoid getting a "document not found error" but removing the content causing problems and explain why the content was removed. We will work on this new procedure to avoid this situation in future.

Thanks

Romain