Checkbox to de-index article

[yggdrasil]

While the help articles suggestion box is nice for people that open a new ticket I don't think all articles should be suggested here. As today, it seems every article you create with WHMCS they assume it's a FAQ or help article. What if someone is using this for longer articles or information, and/or not directly related to a support ticket or question?

The problem here comes that those articles are so long, they add unnecessary noise to the suggestions. I assume WHMCS is not very particular good at this and the more things you add the worse the suggestions are. And some might not even make sense to be suggested. In the future, it would be nice to have a checkbox in articles that makes them NOT to be indexed in the search and ticket suggestions. That way you can mark specific publications not to be appear both in search or ticket suggestions.

[WHMCS ChrisD]

This is a good idea @yggdrasil at the moment there wouldn't be a way to do this out the box, but it could be something the team consider in the future.

[yggdrasil]

1 hour ago, WHMCS ChrisD said:

This is a good idea @yggdrasil at the moment there wouldn't be a way to do this out the box, but it could be something the team consider in the future.

Yes, this could be a very useful feature. Imagine the following scenario. You create a tutorials category, one tutorial alone is 5 or 6 pages long once published. That will make the search and suggestions on tickets extremely bad with that much content. With the suggested checkbox option you could just mark the article so its not indexed by the search and suggestions (skipped) entirely, but visitors can still access it directly from a link or browsing WHMCS help section. Same could be true for other type of contents. Imagine someone pasting a video article only with no text.

[brian!]

1 hour ago, yggdrasil said:

Imagine the following scenario. You create a tutorials category, one tutorial alone is 5 or 6 pages long once published.

you could do that now by editing the template - i'm thinking specifically of kb suggestions (where hooks probably wouldn't work because it's an embedded template).

so in supportticketsubmit-kbsuggestions.tpl, you could add an if statement to not display articles from a given category...

{foreach from=$kbarticles item=kbarticle}
	{if $kbarticle.category neq '2'}
	<p>
		<a href="knowledgebase.php?action=displayarticle&id={$kbarticle.id}" target="_blank">
		<span class="glyphicon glyphicon-file"></span>
		{$kbarticle.title}
		</a> - {$kbarticle.article}...
	</p>
	{/if}
{/foreach}

if it were multiple categories, or multiple articles you could use in_array and define a list in the template of those cats/articles to hide or show (whichever is easier)...

btw - as well as other knowledgebase bugs, kbsuggestions is bugged too... it's showing 3 links (with exactly the same URL) to the same article in the same language... 🙄

now you can temporarily fix that in the template (using a bit of PHP below), but ideally the development team should be spending a bit of more time fixing these things before deploying new features...

{foreach from=array_unique($kbarticles) item=kbarticle}

2 hours ago, yggdrasil said:

With the suggested checkbox option you could just mark the article so its not indexed by the search and suggestions (skipped) entirely, but visitors can still access it directly from a link or browsing WHMCS help section.

again you could do that in the template... or directly with a hook to remove articles from the results based on defined conditions, e.g not category x etc.

with a hook, you could expand the kbarticles array to check its assigned tags and then you could use those tag values for display conditions too... e.g if article contains "non-index" tag, then don't show it in results, but still show it in the kb area.

using tags would be the closest in-built method to your checkbox idea, but possibly slightly more powerful as you could define different reactions based on corresponding tag values.

[yggdrasil]

3 hours ago, brian! said:

you could do that now by editing the template - i'm thinking specifically of kb suggestions (where hooks probably wouldn't work because it's an embedded template).

so in supportticketsubmit-kbsuggestions.tpl, you could add an if statement to not display articles from a given category...

{foreach from=$kbarticles item=kbarticle}
	{if $kbarticle.category neq '2'}
	<p>
		<a href="knowledgebase.php?action=displayarticle&id={$kbarticle.id}" target="_blank">
		<span class="glyphicon glyphicon-file"></span>
		{$kbarticle.title}
		</a> - {$kbarticle.article}...
	</p>
	{/if}
{/foreach}

if it were multiple categories, or multiple articles you could use in_array and define a list in the template of those cats/articles to hide or show (whichever is easier)...

btw - as well as other knowledgebase bugs, kbsuggestions is bugged too... it's showing 3 links (with exactly the same URL) to the same article in the same language... 🙄

now you can temporarily fix that in the template (using a bit of PHP below), but ideally the development team should be spending a bit of more time fixing these things before deploying new features...

{foreach from=array_unique($kbarticles) item=kbarticle}

again you could do that in the template... or directly with a hook to remove articles from the results based on defined conditions, e.g not category x etc.

with a hook, you could expand the kbarticles array to check its assigned tags and then you could use those tag values for display conditions too... e.g if article contains "non-index" tag, then don't show it in results, but still show it in the kb area.

using tags would be the closest in-built method to your checkbox idea, but possibly slightly more powerful as you could define different reactions based on corresponding tag values.

Thanks Brian, seems like a good solution for one category or two categories but I wonder about the performance hit for hundreds of categories or articles as the code would need to process and filter them out on every single page hit which does not seem to scale in terms of performance (you are still pulling the data but hiding it). Its probably better to skip them directly from reading them in the SQL queries in the database, hence the option in the articles or why not, maybe even whole categories would make sense. I have no idea how this works internally on WHMCS as we can't see the code but it would make sense for the code that pulls this suggestions to first read the exclusion list which would save computing resources as well as opposed to getting everything and then just visually filtering them out.

[brian!]

I wouldn't argue that your solution is better - but its fatal flaw is that it relies upon WHMCS getting off their proverbial and actually doing it! 🙄

if Chris had said that they are actually doing it NOW, then fine it will be here in a few months... but once you get a "they might consider it in the future" response, then it's effectively a feature request and abandon all hope, ye who travels down that path, of seeing it this decade!

[yggdrasil]

12 hours ago, brian! said:

I wouldn't argue that your solution is better - but its fatal flaw is that it relies upon WHMCS getting off their proverbial and actually doing it! 🙄

if Chris had said that they are actually doing it NOW, then fine it will be here in a few months... but once you get a "they might consider it in the future" response, then it's effectively a feature request and abandon all hope, ye who travels down that path, of seeing it this decade!

I know, if you think about it, this is not even important vs all the other things they should do first in terms of priority. I don't bother to post anything in the Feature Request page anymore for years. Its useless. I just post ideas here because I know it will get indexed by search engines and there is always hope that someone from WHMCS will read it or maybe in some future they actually do start to look into what we do here in the community in terms of valued feedback.