This release introduces a Trash folder for topics and articles, a warning for missing attachments in ticket replies, and several interface improvements for faster support operations.

Trash Folder for Topics & Articles

Knowledge base articles and community posts now support a soft-delete mechanism via a Trash section.

• Use the Trash action from the menu of an article, post, or category
• Bulk action also available in list views
• Items in Trash are retained for 30 days
• Admins and Owners can restore or permanently delete them
• Auto-deletion occurs after 30 days

Attachment Reminder for Tickets

Agents are alerted when a reply mentions an attachment but none is added:

• Triggers when words like attached, attachment, etc. are detected
• Attach File action is highlighted in red
• The paperclip icon near Submit is also underlined

This helps avoid missing file errors and improves response quality.

“Mark as Spam” Moved to Toolbar

The Mark as Spam action is now directly accessible in the ticket toolbar. One click is enough to send a ticket to Spam.

Organization Column in User List

The admin Users list now shows each user's Organization. No need to open profiles to check which company they belong to.

We’ve released two new admin features to help your team gather better feedback and manage content more effectively.

Require Comment on Negative Satisfaction Ratings

You can now require customers to leave a comment when selecting a negative satisfaction rating on a ticket.

How to enable:

1. Go to Settings > Tickets > Customer Satisfaction
2. Check:
   • Offer end-users the ability to rate their customer service experience on a ticket
   • Make the comment field required if a bad ticket rating is set

Once enabled, users will be prompted to leave a comment if they select a "Bad" rating. The ticket won’t be submitted without it.

This helps your team understand why a rating was low and respond more effectively.

Export Full Community and Knowledge Base Data

You can now export your entire Community and Knowledge Base dataset, including:

• Community Topics
• Community Topic Votes
• Community Replies and Comments
• Votes on Replies and Comments
• User and Agent Data

To use: Go to Admin > Integrations > Export, select the data types to include, and click Save.

You’ll receive a .zip file via email when the export is complete.

Both features are available to all Helprace accounts immediately.

Let us know what you think or leave your suggestions in our Idea Portal!

Forward ticket or ticket reply

You have a choice of forwarding the entire ticket, or an individual ticket reply, to a specified email address or user in your Helprace.   

Learn more here

New ticket from reply

As an alternative to forwarding a reply, you can create a new ticket from a reply. Useful if you want to deal with an issue in a new ticket, while preserving ownership.

Select "New Ticket" from the  menu beside the desired reply.

Change requester email & mailbox easily

Easily change the requester (ticket recipient) email just below the ticket subject. You can see the mailbox that the ticket came to, and change it if you need to, which will send your reply from that address.

Collapsible email headers

No more guessing where an email came from, or missing out on crucial data about the origin (and destination) of an email. Click the envelope icon or the chevron by the name of the user to see all the necessary ticket data, including the destination mailbox, From, Reply-To, To, CC, BCC and Subject.

Search helper

We have added a useful search assistant what allows you to find what you're looking for. When searching tickets, simply click on the required field to set it. Hover for a sample query.

Unpublished status for Updates

We made it easier to collaborate on your updates behind the scenes (see Updates channel). Now you can save your updates as unpublished and publish at a later date.

Change publish date for Updates and Knowledge Base

In addition, you can choose a publish date after you publish initially, preserving an older or setting new publish date. This can be done for both the Updates channel or your Knowledge Base.

Speed, general improvements :)

As always, we performed a long laundry list of tweaks and fixes so that Helprace is at its best!

Here's what we're particularly excited about in this week's launch. Let's jump right in:

More Intuitive Emailing in Helprace

Real Email Attachments

You now have an option of setting how you want your attachments to be sent. You can send an attachment as:

• Both as actual attachment and link to file
• Link to file only

This is available in Settings > TICKETS > Settings.

Improved CC Behavior

We have improved the CC behavior in tickets. Now, replies to the Requester and the CCs are sent via one email.

Organizations

Auto-create Organizations

If you enable automatic creation of organizations, you will be able to create a brand new Organization when a user with a new corporate domain in their email address gets added.

Previous users with a domain matching that of an existing Organization will be added to it automatically once they show some sort of activity.

This is available in Settings > TICKETS > Settings.

Merge Organizations

We allow you to merge Organizations together. This transfers the users, domains and notes from the one Organization to another.

Organizations in Sidebar

Lastly, the sidebar got a small change. There's a new User and Organization icon, and the name of the organization is right there, too!

Teams in Macros

You're now able to specify Teams in macros, which will allow you to assign a ticket to a specific Team.

This is useful if you'd like to perform additional actions with Team assignment. Create a macro that can, for example, add an internal note and a tag while assigning that ticket to a Team.

New Webhook

Introducing a new webhook event: user_wiped. This will let you know when user data is about to be wiped completely and user anonymized. In addition, it also includes data prior to the anonymization.

Might be important for those affected by the GDPR and those who allow users to delete their own profiles. Learn more in API documentation

Agent Ticket Info (placeholder)

You can now control how your emails look like with an Agent Ticket Info placeholder. For example, you can either show or display additional ticket info in email notifications with a placeholder ({$ticket.info})

Reminder Events

You'll now know when a Ticket reminder has reopened a ticket in All Events of your ticket. Before you'd only see tickets get reopened (and not know why).

Other fixes too long to list!

We also improved the overall speed of Helprace, and performed some ticket display improvements that you probably won't even notice :)

Teams

• Teams allow you to restrict agents access to tickets.
• Restrict agent access to content (Spaces) in admin according to Team.
• Use Teams in ticket rules & notifications and ticket routing.

Learn more about Teams

User Groups

• User Groups are used to segment customers for targeted support.
• Restrict user access to content (Spaces) in your portal according to Group.
• Use User Groups in ticket rules & notifications and ticket routing.

Learn more about User Groups

Organizations

• Users within an Organization can see or collaborate on tickets together.
• Restrict user access to content (Spaces) in your portal according to Organization.
• Use Organizations in ticket rules & notifications and ticket routing.

Learn more about Organizations

Set ticket viewing restrictions

There will always be some confidential tickets (with private data or company information) that you'd rather hide from regular, front-of-the-line support agents.

You can now restrict ticket access to certain Teams - that is - make tickets visible only within the team they are assigned to.

Auto-assign tickets within a Team

The ability to escalate tickets in a meaningful way is finally here. You can escalate based on a user's email, domain, User Group, Organization, and many other criteria.

You can also assign tickets to a department, (ie, billing, sales) - and - do so automatically, in round robin method or to a least busy agent.

View tickets & topics by Organization

Organizations are always visible in the user sidebar, whether in tickets or user profile. Be aware of all user activity within any Organization, at all times.

Things like tickets started by other members of that Organizations, or community topics (questions, ideas, etc) submitted.

Let users see tickets within Organization

Sometimes you'd want to enable group interaction or at least get everyone "in the loop" of what's going on within their group. That's an edge Organizations can give you.

Organizations allows users from the same organization to view or respond to each other's tickets. You can customize ticket visibility on an organizational level.

Custom Space Restrictions

Set Spaces as public, for registered users & staff, only staff or only administrators. Limit spaces to certain users, teams and organization members. You can learn more about that here.

We hope you'll love these new updates as much as we do!

Last but still important!

New ways to search

We have greatly improved our search system and the quality of results. This will allow you to create more powerful filters (or views) for your team. Here are the new ways you can search in Helprace:

• Tickets and ticket data, including new, more flexible date ranges.
• Users, their personal information, location, social media, and more.
• Search within Organization list, for users within an Organizations or Groups.

Learn more about searching

Users in Rules & Notifications

There have also been some big changes in our Rules & Notifications, too. For example, we now allow you to specify conditions to include specific emails, wildcards, or users.

This allows you to perform any number of actions based on what user or email address contacts you.

We've also made many small improvements too long to list, all in the name for a better experience for you all!

This week and we're bringing you brand new agent signatures & agent signature manager.

• Signatures are personal, every agent has their own.
• Agents can add multiple signatures and select the most appropriate one when replying to a ticket.
• Signatures can be assigned to mailboxes and are selected by default when using that mailbox.

In summary, signatures are user-specific first and mailbox-specific second. This means that every agent now has the ability to set their own, private signatures and assign them to specific mailboxes in Helprace.

Learn more

Last month we kept busy getting ready for GDPR compliance (that's out now) and released a number of user management and privacy options.

The new Activity page helps you to keep track of anything that happens in your community and knowledge base. View new topics, comments, users, votes, subscriptions, status changes, etc.

We've also added filters if you’re looking for something in particular, for a certain period of time.

Learn more

Moderation

You can now review new posts before or after they go live with our moderation tools.

Learn more

Custom Invoice Details

You can change your invoice details according to your needs. (for example, to update the company name or add VAT number). Updated details will appear in your invoices immediately.

Ticket counters

Ticket counters are a way to notify agents of new tickets - or tickets of importance. Ticket counters show the number of tickets in a badge counter within the favicon and on the Tickets button in the menu.

Learn more

Ticket reminder

Ticket reminders allow you to set the date and time when you want a ticket to be reopened. This is particularly useful when you want to put off working on a ticket to a later time.

Learn more

Topic without Signup

We want to make it easier for your customers to leave feedback - so we added an option that allows users to submit a topic to your community without registration. To start a new topic, all they have to do is provide an email address.

Learn more

New, simpler icons

We updated the UI design with brand-new icons. They give Helprace a cleaner and more professional look.

New Ticket UI

Not too long ago, we updated the look and feel of the community in the admin panel. We replaced text with icons and moved some buttons out of submenus. As a result, common actions are now within reach without cluttering up your work area. This new look now extends to the admin panel’s ticketing interface and the visual editor. Thanks to our new updates and icons, commands feel cleaner and more intuitive to use.

Need to send emails through your SMTP server? No problem.

Learn more

SPF, DKIM, and DMARC

Ensure that every email reaches your customer. With a bit of configuration on your domain control panel you can drastically improve your emails deliverability.

Learn more

Phone Tickets

It is no longer required to specify an email address when creating a ticket. A phone number will do just fine. Do not know your customer’s phone number? Just enter their name and log your communication. You can add their contact details later on, if needed.

Auto BCC

If you need to keep an external copy of each email that your team sends to customers, consider using the Auto BCC feature.

Learn more

Vote on User's Behalf

Know a user that supports an idea but has no time (or doesn't feel like) voting for it? Make their vote count and vote on their behalf.

Learn more

Post on User's Behalf

Did a user bring up a great idea by phone or email? Give credit where it's due by posting the idea for consideration using their account.

Learn more

Detailed View of Community Topics

You can see more details when viewing a topic in the admin panel.

List of voters

Detailed list of who voted for a topic and how.

List of followers

Check who would be getting a notification, should someone comments on the topic or if its status is changed.

List of related topics and check for duplicates

Check on related and similar topics. Found a duplicate? Merge it in one click.

Learn more

Adding a Link to a Topic

While working on a topic you can easily add a link to another topic. No need to open any extra browser tabs to locate and copy the link.

Learn more

Topic Links in the Admin Panel

All new links to topics will open in a relevant area. If you’ve viewing a topic in the user area, the link will open in the user area as usual. Though if you’re looking at the topic in the admin panel, clicking on a link to another topic will open a preview right there, within the admin panel.

If you copy such a link, the user panel URL will be copied though. So you can safely share it with a customer.

Autogenerated Table of Contents

Add a table of contents to your article. It is generated automatically from the article headings. Should you add, rename or remove headings, the ToC will update automatically when article is saved.

If you’d like to stop users from posting additional replies, simply close a topic for further comments.

Topics with certain statuses can be closed automatically, e.g. if a problem is marked as solved or an idea is completed.

Learn more

Vote Limits

Wish to set custom limits for how many times users can vote in discussions? No problem.

Learn more

Splitting Tickets

Did you ever have a customer flood your conversation thread with multiple, unrelated questions? Wish to organize issues in separate tickets? Now you can create a new ticket from any reply or internal note in one click.

Learn more

Feedback Widget for a Particular Space

Have multiple products or services set up? You’ll now be able to create a feedback widget for that particular part of your Helprace. Simply select a desired space when creating a widget.

New Main Menu in Admin Panel

Using Helprace in widescreen on a compact device? You’ll love the new menu. We moved it to the left to save some precious vertical space.

All in all, custom ticket fields place more information at your fingertips, putting you in a better position to offer great customer service.

So that’s it for this week. Don’t worry though - we got new stuff coming all the time, so stay tuned for more updates!

Learn more: Custom ticket fields

A while ago we released the Single Sign-On, published the Helprace API, and just recently we’ve given you the ability to create Custom Apps.

The latest feature in this list is Webhooks. Webhooks allow you to call a script on your server when an event in a ticket, topic or user occurs.

This allows you to create various notifications in your tools, apps or back-end systems.

Some examples include:

• Update customer details (email, phone, activity) in your system when changed in your Helprace account.
• Update your app’s member area based on the changes made in Helprace.
• Alert your team in Slack when an internal note is added.

You can learn more about configuring webhooks in the recent knowledge base article.

Previous/Next Navigation

When viewing a ticket you can go “back and forth” between tickets in one click without going back to the ticket list.

Prev/Next navigation is also available in ticket and topic list previews, e.g. when you’re looking at topics with a certain tag or tickets created by a certain user.

Ticket Play

The Play feature enhances navigation when agents are working on tickets.

Clicking the Play button opens the first ticket and allows agents to work their way through every ticket until there are no more tickets left in the current filter.

This has practical reasons as it prevents agents from cherry-picking the easiest tickets in the list. While normally clicking “next” in the last ticket (or “previous” in the first one) returns you to the ticket list, Ticket Play cycles through an infinite loop until all the tickets are dealt with.

Tip: Your “Default Action On Submit” must be set to Next Ticket to use Ticket Play.

Custom Apps display additional data about your users from an external source. Information is displayed right in your ticket sidebar, helping agents solve tickets more efficiently without interrupting their workflow.

Learn more: Building Custom Apps

Merge Tickets

When customers send you a number of emails regarding the same issue, it can be annoying to say the least. Now you can merge numerous tickets into one conversation stream.

Learn more: Merging tickets

Merge Duplicate Topics

Ever come across the same idea submitted multiple times? Normally you’d delete the duplicate and move on. But what if people have already voted for it and shared their input? You wouldn’t want to lose that valuable customer input.

Fear not! Now you can merge your community topics (questions, ideas, problems) into one in just a few clicks.

Learn more: Merging community topics

Auto-assign Tickets

Assign tickets to the least busy agent or in a circular order (round-robin).

We added a trigger that takes care of automatic ticket assignment to your account. It is disabled by default. Go to Settings > Tickets > Triggers to turn it on.

Learn more: Auto-assigning tickets to agents

Bulk Tickets Update

Change multiple ticket attributes and reply to many tickets at once. Particularly useful when you need to apply common changes to multiple tickets in your ticket list.

Learn more: Updating tickets in bulk

New Captcha

We have updated Captcha in the user signup form. The new Captcha is easier on humans and tougher on bots. Normally users do not even see a Captcha quiz. If they pass background check, the Captcha will be completely invisible to them.

Tickets page

The Tickets page has been completely redesigned. Previously, admins would work with tickets using two columns: ticket list and ticket view.

Not anymore! The ticket list takes up the bulk of the screen - with a handy preview of the message body - and clicking on a ticket opens up the conversation in ticket view. This allowed us to add a user sidebar to the right of the ticket view. The user sidebar displays quick user information with an option to drill down to learn more:

• Avatar, name, job title, phone, email,  etc. More details hidden behind the curtain labeled “more”.
• Quick user notes - you can leave a note about a user for yourself or other team members.
• Customer satisfaction in the current ticket and across all customer's tickets.
• Last 5 user interactions with your portal, e.g. all their tickets, topics, replies, votes, etc. Clicking on a number opens a preview window with the full list of the selected content.

You can delete internal notes, hide and edit ticket replies. It is also possible to see the source of any received email.

Your reply and changes to ticket attributes are automatically saved as draft. You can continue working on a ticket even if you closed the tab or went to a different page.

People page

The People dashboard gives you more freedom to sort, order and find the right person.

The interface is cleaner and more logically laid out: No more Blocked users cluttering your view. They’re hidden from search results or default filters. You’ll only see and search them in the “Blocked” filter.

It is now possible to:

• Add or edit users. Fill in any user details on-the-fly.
• See a user’s full activity, including tickets and community participation.
• Merge users. All content created by them, like tickets and topics is also merged.
• Resend an invitation so a user can access your portal.
• Change a user’s primary email address.
• Change a user’s password.
• Send an email with a password reset link.

New bulk actions on users are available: send invites and password reset emails.

Tags

Brand new Tags management page, where you can create, rename, delete and even merge tags together.

But that’s not all:

• Suggestions when you’re adding tags to a ticket.
• Clicking on a tag opens a list of tickets that have it.
• Tags are color-coded, with the ability to set custom colors.
• Tickets and Community tags are managed separately. Tickets are private while community / knowledge base tags could be public.

Reports

Always be aware of what’s going on in your Helprace. Here are some of the things you can do in Reports:

• Busiest time of day. Pinpoint days and times your customers are being most active.
• Response time. Learn how long users normally wait for an agent's response.
• First response time. Track how long it takes for agents to respond to a user's first message.
• Resolution time. Find out the average time it takes to solve a ticket.
• Replies to solve. Visualize ticket timelines: learn how many times a ticket is bounced around before it's solved.
• Happiness report. See what customers are satisfied and what they have to say about your customer service.
• Team report. View all reports according to team member.
• Custom dates. See reports from a preset or custom date range.
• Report Comparisons. Compare your reports to a previous period or custom date range.
• Printable. Print reports in a nice, clean layout.
• Business hours. Exclude non-working hours from being counted in Response and Resolution Time reports.
• Views. Quickly recall reports by mailbox, tag, support channel, ticket type or ticket priority. Save these reports as views.

To turn on Reports you need to switch to Helpdesk or Complete plans on the Settings > Subscriptions & Billing page. Those on a free plan can go to the Reports page in the Admin Panel and request a time-limited trial (which includes features found in the Complete plan, including reports).

Your previous activity within the account is also reflected in Reports. Once you upgrade, you’ll be aware of crucial insights from day one.

SSL for your domain alias

SSL is now supported for your domain aliases and turned on by default. No charge.

Redesigned User Portal

Cleaner, more flexible and professional looking. If you’ve made changes to the design of your portal, your customizations are safe and sound. We checked.

Happy Helpracing!

This API update makes it easy to vote for topics and retrieve user votes.

Retrieval capabilities have been expanded to include the total number of votes, separating positive and negative totals as well as the number of people who voted for a particular topic.

A new endpoint has been added which supports:

• voting on behalf of a desired user
• listing users who voted for a topic (including their voting data)

Aside from working with votes, you're also able to import topics (especially ideas) from other applications.

Image upload

There is a new endpoint that allows you to upload images to Helprace cloud. It returns a temporary URL to the uploaded image, which you can use to create or edit a ticket, topic, or topic reply.

Similarly, if you're creating or updating a post and its html body contains an <img> tag, the image referenced in this tag will be uploaded to the Helprace cloud.

Notifications

We're giving you more control over notifications through the API. You'll be able to disable notifications for tickets and community topics – including replies and updates made to them.

Last but not least...

A reminder that the API can also be used to create new tickets and topics. The big change is that now you can create topics, replies or comments in your community on behalf of a user - all using the API.

The inputs 'editor' refers to the user and 'submitter' to the agent who posted the item.

Lastly, the new 'host' column in the API logs to identify the source of the API call at a glance.

Check the API documentation for more details.

Great news today, particularly for bloggers and WordPress fans! We've recently created a plugin designed to help you integrate Helprace with your WordPress site without writing any code.

All you have to do is install this plugin and provide your account name and you've got an awesome feedback tab on your site or blog.

You'll also be able to customize your feedback tab without leaving your WordPress admin panel. Here is how the plugin settings page looks like and the customization options available to you:

Want to try it out? Head to the the plugin page on WordPress.org to get started.

That's right - as of today, you can start integrating Helprace with your website or app the way you want it.

With this API you can now build integrations using your tickets, users, community topics, knowledge base or spaces - and much more. Leverage content using an outside source (such as website or app) and exchange data between your application and Helprace.

The Helprace API Documentation is your complete API reference.

Just enter your account name (your Helprace subdomain), your email and password to get started. You'll be able to try different API requests and execute commands without writing a single line of code. 

The big news of the season is that we're introducing extensive customization options for your user-facing portal and feedback widget. There's a lot more to it than that, so read on!

The big one: user portal customization

Today we launch a set of new features that allow you to change the look of your user portal and feedback widget. You can change the style of the UI; add a header & footer to match your website; adjust size and position of various UI elements; add links to your social media pages, other resources and much more. This can be done by adding the the appropriate code in your admin panel:

• CSS stylesheets
• Custom header
• Custom footer
• HTML code for <head>

User portal customization is available in our paid plans and you can learn more at the User portal customization page. 

Refer to articles and community discussions in tickets

Agents can search for and attach knowledge base articles or community topics to tickets. An agent's reply can be supplemented with a relevant discussion or article, giving customers a more comprehensive answer. Learn more: Adding a link to KB article or topic in a ticket reply

More ticket assignment control

In the past, an unassigned ticket changed or modified by an agent would assign it to them automatically. Although this is considered ideal behavior, some admins would prefer to have more control over this.

That's why this update changes how auto-assignment works. From now on, there is a new trigger taking care of auto assignment. While by default replying to an unassigned ticket assigns it to the sender, changing ticket properties or adding an internal note leaves the ticket unassigned.

With the help of the triggers (you can learn more about triggers here), admins can change auto-assignment behavior or disable it altogether.

Speaking of tickets and triggers...

We've also put some serious elbow-grease into trigger and ticketing improvements.

Default line-breaks in your tickets

Starting a new ticket or replying a ticket will feel more like replying to an email. From now on when an agent or user is working on a ticket, pressing Enter will insert a line-break, rather new start a new paragraph. We guarantee your tickets will look nicer and easier to read thanks to this small improvement :)

To start a new paragraph when responding to a ticket just press Shift-Enter.

Your KB articles and community topics editor will keep working same as before.

Revamped notification triggers

We have simplified default triggers that send notifications about ticket changes or replies to agents. We went with the philosophy that less is more and managed to cut the amount of triggers by half, without compromising their functionality or affecting the triggers you've modified or created – that would be just uncool.

To see the new triggers, you will need to reset them. Resetting triggers will remove any changes you made to them and deletes all your custom triggers. If you haven't done any changes to them, simply head to the Settings > TICKETS > Triggers page and clicking Reset to Default.

So thanks for reading and thanks for your feedback - it's all because of you these feature were built!

Customer satisfaction ratings

Today we launched customer satisfaction ratings, which lets your end-users quickly and easily rate their support experiences.

By default, customers receive an email 24 hours after their ticket was resolved, prompting them to rate their support. They're also able to provide an optional comment to supplement their rating.

Customer satisfaction rating emails are fully customizable since they're sent using business rules. Their timing, content as well as targeting can be set according to your needs. Learn more by reading the article: Enabling and customizing customer satisfaction ratings.

Auto saving tickets and topics

When you abandon a reply without submitting it (due to a crashed browser, by closing your tab or moving to another ticket), you'll be able to come back to your edits at a later time.

This applies to all agents working on tickets, in addition to knowledge base & community topics, replies and comments. 

Specify the "From" email address

For those who have more than one custom email address in Helprace, you'll now be able to specify which address you'd like to use when creating a new ticket.

This is done by selecting a "From" address from a drop down box when filling out a new ticket. Note that multiple email addresses are available in "Targeted (Ticketing)" and "All-In" plans.