Forum Discussion
Remove items from News on SharePoint Communication Site
You can change the promoted state to 0, which makes the site a "regular" site page, not a News page. To do that you first have to expose Promoted State in a view (choose a flat view to make it easier to edit). (Use the + in the library view and then select Promoted State and be sure to press Apply.) Once you ahve exposed the column, you can change the order by editing the view.
Then, in quick edit, change promoted state from 2 (news) to 0 (site page). I think the challenge with this approach is that the page still exists and it can still be found in search and you now have it mixed in with "regular" site pages. You could also add a column to Site Pages and "tag" the page as Archive or something like that - but unless you un-publish, it will still be visible in search.
Demoting Sharepoint News without having to delete the page:
- On the Sharepoint site click on "Site Content".
- Click on "Site Pages".
- Select the "All Pages" View.
- Click on Add Column and then on the show/hide columns option a call out menu of all the available columns will appear on the right of the page.
- Tick the "Promoted state" Colum and then tick the apply option.
- Click on the "Quick Edit" option and see if you can edit the value in the "Promoted State" Column the chances are that it will be greyed out in which case you need to follow the further steps.
- Exit Quick Edit, Click the drop down arrow on the promoted state column and go to column settings and edit. A call out menu will appear on the right hand side, don't change it just click save this will enable the option to edit the promoted state value as noted below.
- Select the page that you want to change the promoted state of, click on the circled i to bring up the information options and then select "Edit All"
- The value under promoted state should be editable now and 0 equals not promoted and 2 equals promoted.
I would add a couple of caveats to this advice. Use the promote or create news page to promote pages in the first place don't change the value above to 2 as a way of promoting a page. This could be open to human error and you might end up promoting the wrong page. Secondly it might make sense to use the permissions level to change who can and cannot change the promoted state as you don't want everybody to be able to do this. I am unsure exactly how to do this.
This does not cover the option to set a timescale on a news item which is shown above.
Hope this helps.
Hydeparkandy The number of responses here about a basic and obvious requirement - the ability to truly unpublish news posts - indicates just how poorly designed and confused the modern/classic hybrid state of SP is.
The "unpublish" option just unpublishes the latest version and reverts to the previous one - so doesn't do what it implies.
Changing a post's promoted state field to 0 to make it a regular site page doesn't remove it from the news feed so also apparently doesn't do what it implies. My guess is there's a bug here or a coding error that causes this.
Note also the strange logic behind the promoted state field. A value of "2" technically means a published news post. But if you manually change that property to published (2), you're editing the page so need to republish it. Makes no sense.
The only real option is to train people to not publish until they are sure they want their content to be seen. (Good luck with that!) If they do by mistake, they'll have to delete the post and start over. Or manually reposition the offending post so it drops off the news web part view.
Jeeeez!