Allow certain people to verify any Card in a Collection

Related products: Guru Administration

I would love it if we could had the ability for someone/or a few designated people - perhaps the Collection Owner group - to verify ANY card in a Collection, regardless of if they are the verifier. I am often making updates to a card after it's created that are formatting only edits, but the content itself is accurate, and then the card verifier has to go back and verify the card once I make my updates.

agreed! as collection owners, it would be great to have "super" permissions to be able to verify regardless of the assigned verifier. there's often times that I want to be able to make an easy edit for someone, but then it requires re-verification from the assigned verifier
I love the idea of Collection Owner or even Admin having a super verification ability. Because logically, if you are one of those two roles, you are a capable enough person who can reach out to the verifier-of-record and confirm they agree with the verification before you do it. (Overkill, I know, but #officepolitics)

Alternative solution in the meantime, I believe if you set the Verifier on a card to a Group, then anyone in that Group can approve...right? The annoying part of this is that every member gets notified of every verification request, so you'd want it to be a tight group who don't mind that.
Hi Ali, we created a tool to help us do this and a few other things like global find/replace. It's open source and isn't perfect, but it might be able to help you until we convince Guru to hook us up with this often requested feature.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/guru-cli

Verifying an article on behalf of the verifier is as simple as running `guru-cli verify-by-title 'title of article'`

One big gotcha though is that it currently *doesn't work for verifying articles if you've assigned a group as a verifier to any article.* I recently discovered the issue and should be pushing a fix sometime next week.

Anyway, just throwing it out there. :slightlysmilingface:
Another way to make some of these changes, rather than being able to verify any card, is to make the change in a way that doesn't cause the card to become unverified in the first place.

Unfortunately you can't do this through the webapp or extension but you can do it with our API! If you make the API call to update a card as a PATCH call (instead of a PUT) then Collection Owners can update a card where someone else is the verifier and have the card remain verified.
Ah gotcha - using the API to do this is way over my head, I'd probably need some eng help from our team, but I'll add it to the backlog of stuff I need to explore when I actually get time to focus on the API capabilities and getting things implemented!

Really would like to see this feature delivered to members who are Collection owners. That would further validate the helpfulness of guru where we can “Delegate” card authorship to folks, but as Collection Owners you are still empowered to make changes when necessary without disrupting the verification status.


Hi all! Steph from the Guru PM team here. Thanks for your great feedback! We don’t have current plans to prioritize implementing this functionality, so I’ll leave this as “open” status. I’m excited to share that we expect to spend some time in the next couple quarters looking at Guru permissions as a whole, so please continue to vote and share your thoughts so we can use those to evaluate enhancements.

In the meantime, definitely take a look at Rob’s post in this thread on using our API for this. He provides some great insights.


We’ve set the internal standard that cards aren’t assigned to a single user as verifiers. We’ve created a verifier group within each collection so that the group can share the responsibility of maintaining all cards within the collection and the weight of the collection doesn’t fall to a single user. 

 

Additionally, its creates simpler work in terms of maintenance in the case of turnover. Maintaining the group is far easier than having to update the verifier on each card. In the case an employee in the verifier group leaves - the work still sits with the other users within the group. 


As we can see from this thread, there are pros and cons to assigning an individual Verifier versus a Group Verifier to a Card. In general, Guru recommends assigning an individual Verifier because it offers greater accountability than a Group. With one subject matter expert, it’s simple to understand who is responsible for maintaining Card content and trust score.

However, there are some scenarios, like when multiple Authors or Collection Owners are contributing to a Card and there is a desire to optimize for keeping the Card verified, where it might make sense to set a small Group as Verifier. In this scenario, it might not be efficient for an individual Verifier to keep up with all of the Card edits. When the person editing the Card belongs to the Group assigned as Verifier, they can publish without disrupting the Card’s trust state. However, you may want to consider whether opening up verification to a Group may introduce risk if all of the Group members are not subject matter experts and monitor Collection trust score to ensure continued accountability when Cards become unverified. 

There are also a couple of workarounds that can help when seeking to keep Card content uniform or updated apart from verification. Card templates can be crafted to help reinforce uniformity in content structure. Guru’s API can also be used to update Card content without impacting the Card’s trust state. 

In summary, when naming a Card Verifier, it’s important to consider what outcome you’re optimizing for. Guru still doesn’t have plans to prioritize implementing this functionality, but please do keep upvoting and sharing your use cases and best practices here for the benefit of other users. 👍