Home → Release Notes → Release Notes → HelpSpot 5.7.0

1.2. HelpSpot 5.7.0

HelpSpot 5.7.0

Release Date: April 23rd 2026

Important: This release includes several security fixes. All HelpSpot customers are strongly encouraged to update as soon as possible. HelpSpot cloud customers will be upgraded automatically.

Breaking Changes

• Portal registration now requires email verification — New portal registrations must confirm their email address via a signed verification link before a session is established. Existing portal accounts are backfilled as verified, so only new registrations are affected. Portals using external authentication (SAML, LDAP, or Blackbox) are not affected — accounts provisioned through those providers are marked verified automatically since the identity is vouched for by the upstream system.

  Portal template changes: A new portal page (pg=login.verify) is shown to newly registered users while they check their email. Secondary portals pick the new page up automatically, any template that doesn’t exist in the portal’s custom_templates directory falls back to the default. The one exception is if you have customized index.tpl.php: add a new case 'login.verify': branch to its page-routing switch so the new page is rendered. You only need to copy the new login.verify.tpl.php into a portal’s custom_templates directory if you want to restyle it to match that portal’s branding.

Native Customer Satisfaction Surveys

HelpSpot now ships a built-in customer satisfaction survey system, removing the need for third-party survey tools for most helpdesk feedback workflows.

Key capabilities:

• Three scoring types — CSAT (1–5 scale), Customer Loyalty (0–10 scale, grouped into detractors, passives, and promoters), and a simple thumbs up / thumbs down.
• Email delivery with signed URLs — Surveys are embedded in outgoing emails via a template tag and each response link is signed, so scores cannot be spoofed.
• Customer-facing response page — Respondents can submit a score and leave an optional comment.
• Reports — New Survey Trends report (score distribution over time with configurable grouping) and Survey Responses report (per-response drilldown with filter conditions).
• Filter and automation conditions — Filters and automation rules can match on survey score, whether a response exists, and whether a comment was left — useful for routing or escalating based on customer feedback.

Full documentation on this feature is available in our knowledge books. 

API Changes

• New skipReopen parameter on private.request.update — The endpoint previously reopened any closed, trashed, or spam request on any update, even metadata-only changes such as custom field writes. Passing skipReopen=1 now lets API consumers update fields on a closed request without changing its state. As part of this fix, the auto-reopen/untrash/unspam history entries are now correctly attributed to the authenticated API user rather than appearing as a customer action. Using skipReopen=1 on a spam request returns a clear 400 error (spam must be cleared before updates).

Bug Fixes

• Search indexing on SQL Server — Fixed an issue where background search-indexing jobs could fail to run on Windows / SQL Server installations.
• Automation rules with “date is not set” on datetime custom fields — Automation rules that checked a datetime custom field for “date is not set” no longer fail when the rule runs.
• Duplicate requests from a single email — Under heavy load, the same incoming email could occasionally be processed twice and create a duplicate request. The mail processing job now guards against this so each email is only turned into a request once.
• Windows setup.bat path whitespace — Trailing whitespace in the AppPath and PHPPath values is now trimmed, so setup still works if a space was inadvertently added while editing the file.
• Live Lookup failures on IIS with HTML emails — Live Lookup calls triggered from requests with HTML bodies could silently fail on IIS due to an oversized query string. The HTML body is no longer included in the Live Lookup URL, matching how other note-body fields are already handled.