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Getting StartedHome → Users Manual → Filters → Deleting a Filter
6.6. Deleting a Filter
Updated: 16 Sep 2026, 06:42 PM EDT
A filter can be deleted by the person who created it, or by an administrator. Deletion is immediate and permanent — there is no undo and nothing to restore it from.
Deleting a filter
Open the filter, then choose Delete Filter from the Options menu above the request grid. HelpSpot asks for confirmation before it goes. See The Filter Options Dropdown Menu for the rest of that menu.
Delete Filter appears under the same rule as Edit: on filters you created, or on any filter if you are an administrator. It is not offered on the four system filters — the Inbox, My Queue, SPAM and Trash cannot be deleted at all. See System Filters.
What happens when a filter is deleted
Deleting a filter does more than remove it from your own left navigation. If anyone else could see it, this is what changes for them:
- It disappears for everyone at once. A shared filter is removed from the left navigation of every staff member it was shared with. Nobody is notified.
- Anyone using it as their default workspace is moved to My Queue. If a staff member had made the filter the view they land on at login, HelpSpot switches them to My Queue without telling them why their landing page changed.
- The sharing list goes too. The people and permission groups the filter was shared with are discarded along with it.
- It cannot be recovered. The filter's conditions, display columns and options are removed outright. Getting it back means building it again from scratch.
The deletion itself is recorded. HelpSpot writes an entry to the Audit Log showing which staff member deleted which filter, and when. That entry identifies the filter but does not preserve what was in it, so the log answers "who removed it" — not "what did it contain". See Audit Log.
Before deleting a filter other people use
Open the filter editor and check Who else can view this on the Filter tab. Anything other than Only me means other people have it in their navigation, and one of them may be landing on it every morning. See Sharing Filters and Permissions.
Deleting a filter you cannot open
A filter can end up in a state where it will not load — most often because something it referenced no longer exists, such as a category or a custom field that has since been deleted. The usual Delete Filter option lives inside the filter, so a filter that will not open cannot be removed that way.
Administrators can delete it from Admin > System > Filter Management instead. That page lists every filter in the system, including other staff members' personal filters, and each row carries its own delete link that works without opening the filter. See Filter Management.
The same page is the practical place to remove a filter belonging to someone who has left, or to work through a backlog of unused filters in one sitting.
Two recent changes make a stuck filter less likely in the first place:
- As of HelpSpot 5.8.4, deleting a custom field that is still referenced by a filter, automation rule or report warns you first, so you can update the filter before the field disappears. See Custom Fields.
- As of HelpSpot 5.8.5, a filter sorted by a custom field that was later deleted falls back to sorting by request ID instead of failing to load.
On earlier versions — or where the filter references a deleted category rather than a custom field — Filter Management is still the way to clear it out.