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KB User's Guide - Documents Tab - Minor vs Major Document Changes

When publishing a change to an existing KB document, the change will be marked as either "major" or "minor". This document describes how this designation is determined, as well as the effects of publishing a major change.

How Minor and Major Changes are Calculated

A published change being designated as "minor" or "major" depends on how much of the content has changed since the last time the document was published. This is calculated as a percentage based on the words in the key content fields—title, summary, body, and internal notes.

The following is excluded from this calculation:  keywords, HTML tags, and the CSS/JavaScript field. For this reason, the insertion, modification, or deletion of supplementary content like images and hyperlinks will not be counted, nor will styling changes.

When you save a document as In Progress or In Review (i.e., a draft), you will see a "Content change since the last save" percentage displayed on the submission confirmation screen. It will also be logged in the Comments and Events history for the document. 

The confirmation page that the document has successfully been updated showing that the Estimated content change since the last save is 73%.

When you publish a document, you will also see a "Content change compared to the last active version" percentage displayed. This, as well as the change since the last save, will be logged in the Comments and Events history.

The confirmation page that the document has successfully been activated, showing that the Estimated content change since the last save is 5% and the Estimated content change compared to the last active version is 52%.

Group-Level Change Threshold

By default, a published change that constitutes over 20% of the document content will be flagged as a major change. This threshold can be adjusted for individual KB group spaces by a site admin by doing the following:

  1. Open the Settings tab and go to the Group Spaces page.
  2. Click the Edit button for your group space.
  3. Select the desired percentage from the Default change threshold: dropdown
  4. Click Update to save your changes.

Doc-Level Change Threshold

If needed, you can set the change threshold for an individual document to be higher or lower than the group-level threshold. This doc-level threshold can be adjusted by doing the following:

  1. Set the document in question to In Progress and open the document edit screen.
  2. At the bottom of the page, expand the Additional Fields section.
  3. Set the ChangeThreshold dropdown to the desired percentage.
    • Note: Your group's current default change threshold will be displayed next to the dropdown for your reference.
  4. Submit your document to save your changes. The new threshold will take effect when the document is activated.

Effects of a Major Change

A published change being flagged as "major" has two key effects:

  1. If the document is currently shared with one or more other group spaces, a major change will temporarily take the document down and move it back to In Review for those spaces. They will then need to review and republish the document.
  2. Any users that have subscribed to changes for that document will receive an automated email notification alerting them to the change. For more information on subscribing to changes, please see: KB User's Guide - General Info - Subscribe to Changes

Keywords:
difference between effects updates updated content percentage changed sharing groups review subscriber subscribed subscription notifications
Doc ID:
109513
Owned by:
Leah S. in KB User's Guide
Created:
2021-03-03
Updated:
2023-10-12
Sites:
KB User's Guide