updated_at vs. edited_at

HeyO Brad,

"updated_at" is part of the more general Article object and refers to any changes to the article: body, title, author, etc.

"edited_at" is part of the Article Comment object and refers specifically to the editing of that comment field. 

Is there any reason an article would be updated (i.e. the updated_at field changes) without a manual action by a guide editor? Spot checking the list of articles updated from the API and the list in the new Manage articles > History feature, I'm seeing some discrepancies. There are articles that have been updated in the previous week according to the API, but I can't tell what it is that's been changed.

Hey Kevin, 

Yes, if anyone commented or voted on the article, that would show up as an updated_at action.

Thanks. Is there any way to identify the last action to cause an update, or a list of what actions cause an article to update? I want to sort articles by "updated_at", but I'm not sure I want to include all the "updated_at" actions.

Hey Kevin!

I'm going to see if I can find an answer for you on this. Stand by!

Hi Kevin!

The general rule is that anything that modifies the article's metadata will impact that "updated_at" property. Unfortunately, we do not currently have a list of those specific actions. I'll be bringing note of this to our team as it's a great opportunity for more documentation. Thanks!

Trying to find some details about the updated_at parameter and the lack of the "edited_by" parameter on the Help Center Articles API.  I'd like to be able to get a list of Articles in descending order from a Section, and order them descending based on their edit dates.  We go back and make edits to some of the articles, hence the reason we want to float it to the top, so "updated_at"  was a natural choice.

Problem:  Whenever someone votes on a document (helpful or not), it triggers the updated_at timestamp which means that users jump to the top of the API call.  I tried edited_by even though this wasn't listed here

https://developer.zendesk.com/rest_api/docs/help_center/articles

but I was hopeful it would be there.  Any chance we can get this added?  What is the process to doing feature requests? (i.e. start a new thread here or something).

Yes, I'd LOVE an edited_at key for Articles, but sadly that is only available for Article Comments.  When I try to use it for the Articles end-point is responds as invalid option.  If you could bring that option to the Article end-point, such as:

/api.../section/xxxxxxxxxxxx/articles.json?sort=edited_at 

then that would be exactly what I need =)

Is there a way we can capture an article's publishing time? I'm unable to identify that when an article is drafted before and is published later. Can only see updated_at changes. But, with that I wouldn't be able to identify that article's state is changed from 'draft'  to 'published' state?