Page Deletions
Occasionally, your department will come across outdated content or pages that no longer serve a purpose on the Dickinson website and should be removed. When you come across any content or pages like this, please send a request into the HelpDesk asking for it to be removed. A member of Online Marketing will begin the removal process and keep you posted on progress.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why can't I delete pages myself?
Faculty and staff at large used to be given open access to delete pages at their own discretion; however, this introduced issues when pages were being deleted on accident or without properly removing existing links from the Dickinson website before removal. As such, Online Marketing has chosen to take the responsibility for all removals and deletions of Document Pages and Homepages from the Dickinson website.
Can I remove a page temporarily?
Document Pages and Downloads feature the ability to take them offline, which can be used to remove these pages from the Dickinson website without permanently deleting them. However, while this function exists, we do ask that taking either of these pages offline is considered a temporary measure (1-2 weeks maximum) and that Online Marketing is informed of this decision via the HelpDesk before taking anything offline. Unfortunately, taking a page offline will still break any links leading to the page, which refelcts poorly on our website's overall accessibility.
Homepages, unfortunately, don't have the ability for temporary removals, so deleting a Homepage will always be a permanent measure. Online Marketing will always reach out to confirm your intentions to delete a page before doing so.
How long will the deletion process take?
This will be dependent on how prevalent the page is on the website, the number of pages you're deleting at one time and the currently availability of the Online Marketing team. Deleting a page that has existed for many years and has been linked many places will take some time for Online Marketing to track down existing links and remove them, while newer pages with little to no links can be removed rather quickly. Part of the deletion process will also involve processing takedown requests within our Search Console on the website to remove the URL from search results prior to deletion. We unfortunately cannot control how quickly the Search Console processes these requests, but it usually occurs within 1-2 days. Only once these two tasks have been completed will a page be deleted. For a single deletion request, it should assumedly take no more than a week.
Can deleted pages be recovered?
A little yes, a little no. Unfortunately, Jadu doesn't feature the ability to recover recently deleted content, which is why Online Marketing will always double check to ensure pages are meant to be permanently removed before doing so.
However, there are, in certain circumstances, ways to recover deleted content:
- Track Changes: Document Pages, Homepages and Downloads each have access to the "Track Changes" tool within their respective "Actions" dropdown menus. This tool can be used to roll the page back to any previous version and recover deleted content from within the page.
- Note: this is in instances where content is deleted from within a page, unfortunately there is no way to recover a fully deleted Document Page, Homepage or Download.
- Document Pages: if you accidentally deleted a Page from a Document without Publishing the changes, you can open the page by selecting "View Live" from the "Actions" dropdown menu, navigate to the deleted page, copy the content, add a new Page to the Document, and paste the copied content onto the new Page. This will make it seem like the deletion never occured.
- Note: If this is within a multi-page Document, you may need to reorganize the new Page into the previous Page's place within the Document.
- Note: this is in instances where a Page is deleted from within a Document, unfortunately there is no way to recover a fully deleted Document.
- Development Server: for any accidentally deleted piece of content (Document Pages, Homepages, Downloads, Multimedia Files), depending on when the content was created, there might be a copy saved on the current version of the Dickinson development website where a member of Online Marketing can pull the deleted content for use on a new copy of the page.
- Note: if the content was created very recently, it's highly unlikely that the development server will contain a copy of the content, as the development server gets updated very infrequently.