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Phil_UK
Phil_UK
January 20, 2023
Question

"Message not found" error in search

  • January 20, 2023
  • 1 reply
  • 0 views

When I'm searching for help in the community, I keep following results and getting to a "Message not found" error, due to the article being deleted. However, these deleted articles are still showing up in the search!

 

Has anybody found a way to stop the search showing results where the message has been deleted? It's incredibly frustrating to see what looks like a potential answer to a question only to find it's gone!

1 reply

G
GeorgiaC
January 20, 2023

Hi Phil_UK, we're sorry for the frustration being caused by this - currently, there's no way to remove the removed article suggestion, however we will pass this onto our Community dev team for review. 

Phil_UK
Phil_UKAuthor
January 20, 2023

Hi Georgia,

 

Many thanks for this.

 

My background as a programmer may help here. If the search tool refreshed its index regularly, it should have stopped finding these deleted messages by now (it's been like this for months), so I'm guessing it only adds new articles to the index. In this case, when the team went through deleting messages all over the place, they should also have deleted the references to those articles in the index.

 

Having not done that, I think you will now need someone to go through and remove those invalid links from the index, so the search results only provide links to questions and answers that actually exist.

 

Please can you get an indication on the timeframe for this to happen; as I mentioned, it's very frustrating to find that potentially useful answers to a question have been intentionally deleted, and you're going to get people repeating questions without searching if we get fed up with finding non-existent search results.

A
Ashleigh1
January 20, 2023

Hi Phil, Thanks for sharing this we will pass this on to the team, we will try our best to get a timeframe for you on this.

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