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Overview of Stale

As your product and company evolve, it's often difficult to keep your docs evolving at the same pace. By marking articles as stale inside HelpDocs, your team knows exactly what needs updating.

River Sloane
Updated by River Sloane

Ever feel like your documentation is playing catch-up with your product updates? The Stale feature in HelpDocs helps you stay on top of outdated content, even when you don't have all the details for updates right away.

An example Stale article in the Article view

This smart tracking system keeps your Knowledge Base reliable for users searching for accurate information.

Running a product team? Check out our guide Sync & Ship for tips on keeping your Knowledge Base synchronized with product updates.

Understanding Stale

A Stale article is a soft flag indicating content needs review or updating. It's not a punishment, it's a helpful reminder system.

The feature exists to help teams track outdated content and prevent drift between your product and documentation. When information becomes incorrect or incomplete, marking it stale ensures nothing falls through the cracks.

Use our content filters to find Stale articles quickly when updating lots of articles at a time.

Who Should Use Stale Marking

Team

When to Mark as Stale

💌 Support

Customer reports outdated information

🛠️ Engineering

Features mentioned in articles get updated or removed

📝 Content Teams

Scheduling content reviews in upcoming sprints

💖 Anyone

Spotting outdated info without having update details ready

Spotting Stale Content

Finding Stale articles is easy thanks to visual indicators throughout the admin interface.

Inside the Content view

A bright yellow badge will appear on the article row. If your article has a Stale reason, hover over the badge to read it.

Inside the Article Editor

When your article is currently Stale, a bright yellow button will show in the top right. If the article is due to go Stale in a set amount of time in the future, the button will display the time until the article goes Stale.

Weekly Email Reports

Automated email reports help you maintain content freshness without constant manual checking. Each weekly report shows:

  • Total count of stale articles
  • Articles that became stale during the past week

To enable weekly reports:

  1. Head to Profile (or click here)
  2. Toggle on Send me weekly Stale emails
  3. Hit Save Changes

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Marking Articles as Stale

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