HubSpot Community - Option for disabling attachments in the chat

rachelsheley · ‎May 20, 2019

We have been receiving spam from chatters on our site that includes all sorts of attachments, from documents to pictures, that are completely irrelevant. I'd like to suggest an option to disable the file attachment feature of the chatbot.

This sort of activity can be dangerous, on top of being obnoxious. We don't want anyone on our Hubspot team to click on a potentially dangerous file. In addition, disabling it would clean up much of our chat conversations.

If we have no need for attachments in our chat, we should not have to have them enabled.

CBentley · ‎Feb 12, 2019

Hubspot recently added the ability to attach images and files under 10mb, but now it is always there with no option to turn off. Anyone can send our chat operators any images or files whether we want them or not.

We work in the reproductive health industry and this is an issue for our business for two reasons:

1. We do not use Hubspot to interact with any personal health data for our leads or clients and now people can send forms that should not be collected by support.

2. We attract a certain type of spam working with the reproductive process and now any website visitor could send our operators explicit images over anonymous chat.

All we would need is an on/off button for enabling attachments or not.

bheo · ‎Feb 12, 2019

I completely second this idea.

HubSpot's chat widget comes in handy for a lot of businesses, but it also opens a channel for visitors to send unnecessary and even inappropriate files to the website. I understand the need for attachments for a lot of businesses- and so creating an option to toggle this on and off would be ideal.

Mela · ‎Jul 9, 2019

Yup, we got inappropriate pictures of people's genitalia. Why in the world is this not something that you can turn on or off?? Please fix this asap.

tylerroy · ‎Oct 1, 2019

Totally agree. It doesn't make sense to not have on/off control of this feature. I hope HubSpot fixes this ASAP.

gsandberger · ‎Nov 15, 2019

I agree with all your points mentionend! Hubspot should offer an option to turn upload on/off.

jschroeffel · ‎Nov 21, 2019

We have had teh same problem with inappropriate pictures through chat. It is silly that we cannot turn off this option. There is no reason our client's ever need to send a file through chat.

HotDogJessica · ‎Jan 15, 2020

We have a client who is an attorney and it could be bad for a lead to upload something like legal documents to chat. It creates a nasty, complicated situation. Think of the financial firms and other consultant type businesses that don't want chat to be used this way.

GeoComb · ‎Apr 14, 2020

I received this today from HubSpot Support:

Thanks so much for your patience while I was digging into this for you. I spoke with one of the product managers from our engineering team, and am happy to report that not only are we getting ready to roll out a beta for this feature, but I actually have a workaround that you can implement right now to disable the file upload feature in your chat widget.

You will just need to add the following script to the head HTML of any page with your chat widget on it. Seeing as your chatflow looks to be targeting all website pages, I'd recommend adding the script at the domain-level if possible. Here is that script:

<script>
  window.hsConversationsSettings = {
    disableAttachment: true
  }
</script>

GeoComb · ‎Apr 14, 2020

Here's a fix. A rollout is coming.

Here's what Support had to say:

Thanks so much for your patience while I was digging into this for you. I spoke with one of the product managers from our engineering team, and am happy to report that not only are we getting ready to roll out a beta for this feature, but I actually have a workaround that you can implement right now to disable the file upload feature in your chat widget.

You will just need to add the following script to the head HTML of any page with your chat widget on it. Seeing asyour chatflow looks to be targeting all website pages, I'd recommend adding the script at the domain-level if possible. Here is that script:

<script>
  window.hsConversationsSettings = {
    disableAttachment: true
  }
</script>

I used a simple block with that snippet in the footer with my Drupal site. Worked great. Looking forward to the rollout of the switch in settings.

cdewey22 · ‎Apr 15, 2020

Hi all- Thanks @GeoComb for posting that. We are working on getting this documentation in our API docs right now, but this is available for beta and fully supported as posted above!

I will resolve this idea as soon as we get this posted in our tech docs.

Thanks,

Cassie

cdewey22 · ‎May 14, 2020

This is now out live to all! You find documentation for this functionality in our API docs, specifically in the Disable Attachments section. https://developers.hubspot.com/docs/methods/conversations_api/hsconversationssettings

jschroeffel · ‎May 14, 2020

Great stuff. I love it when a reasonable idea gets action. Thanks @cdewey22

GeoComb · ‎May 17, 2020

Awesome team there at HubSpot! They even set up a zoom with the dev team and myself to get feedback and details.

Thank you!

robinsonjn22 · ‎Aug 11, 2020

Is there not an option inside of HubSpot to disable attachments? Ideally, this would be implemented instead of requiring users to upload a code snippet to the site. Would make this easier to manage downstream.

GeoComb · ‎Aug 11, 2020

There is not going to be an option within the UI to implement this. I thought they had done that when I posted my glowing comment, but all they actually did was to post the existing snippet. They do not intend to make a config option in the UI at this time. It would be easy to make a switch at the chat inbox to enable/disable it with simple visibility rules on the fly with JS but it isn't a priority...yet.

RichardA · ‎Jan 12, 2021

Have there been any further developments to this? I'd much rather be able to disable the feature centrally via an 'allow attachments?' button, than by editing a script on a webpage (or across several pages).

Thanks,

Richard

JBobin · ‎Jan 20, 2021

Hey HubSpot - my Live chat person is getting explicit images regularly through Live chat. We have strong SEO and advertising that pulls in a lot of web chat, which is beneficial for sales. However we have NO need for images to be attached to any inbound chat.

We have a great female employee doing chat for us and is receiving daily explicit images. This is nearing sexual harassment, and this employee is complaining about this and there's nothing we can do for her. Simply put, it's irresponsible of HubSpot to allow any image to be attached to your live chat client, with your customer having no control over this. We will not have a developer deploy your script throughout our website - it should be an On/Off switch just like you have for many other features.

Since tens of your customers have already asked about this, how about deploying this fix soon?

Jack

spencer_martin · ‎Feb 25, 2021

It looks like this is something that can be disabled via API, but not currently in-app (documentation here). For users who do not have access to a developer, this would be very helpful to be able to toggle on/off in-app.

LOConnor123 · ‎Sep 15, 2021

^

ALloyd3 · ‎Apr 25, 2022

Absolutely need this, although it's been years since any follow-up. Has this been implemented already?

HubSpot Ideas

Option for disabling attachments in the chat