The person who originally created a solution is the author. But any agent can create a solution, and agents have turnover.
Removing the agent when they leave or are reassigned leads to the article having a "Deleted Agent" for the author.
The first problem is, it's impossible to edit and save the article unless you are a system administrator.
Users come and go, but just because a user is gone does not mean the articles they created should no longer be editable by other agents. This is a weird restriction that should not exist.
Either users should be allowed to update the authors of articles themselves, or else the Deleted Agent status should not prevent an agent from saving changes to articles. Under the current environment, deleting an agent leads to a bunch of articles which can no longer be edited or updated, causing them to have incorrect, outdated information.
The only way to fix this is to assign the article a new author. But the author can only be assigned by an administrator, and support have been unable to tell me which specific administrator permissions are required.
To make matters worse, each article must be updated one at a time. There is no bulk update. Since there could be hundreds or even thousands of articles, this is clearly an undesirable state of affairs.
Ideally, deleting a user should prompt the administrator to assign their solutions articles to another user at the time of deletion. Failing that, there should be a way for the administrator to bulk update authors.
The underlying cause of this is that the author of an article cannot be a contact. Allowing the author of an article to be a Contact would resolve the entire problem seamlessly.
Leaving the user in place as an occasional user is not an acceptable solution, it's a low quality workaround kludge.
The second problem is that each article must have the author manually changed.
