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🗓️ Release Notes | August 2026

Written by Michael Stephenson

This article keeps you informed about the latest developments from Element451. Every month, we highlight everything from bug fixes and minor improvements to new features and major enhancements.

We update this article regularly throughout the month as new releases, improvements, and bug fixes are rolled out. Please check back frequently to stay informed.

To explore other months or specific release notes, visit our Release Notes collection. You should also check out our Planned Releases to get a glimpse of what's to come.


New and Enhanced Features

Filter Segments by User Status

You can now choose whether a segment includes active contacts, deactivated contacts, or both. Use the new User Status filter at the start of the filter bar in People to build segments of deactivated contacts for auditing and reporting, or combine active and deactivated records in one view. Segments continue to include active contacts only by default, so existing segments are unchanged. Note that calculated segments and segments evaluated by workflows or journeys always use active contacts. Learn more in Creating a Segment.

Start Applications on Behalf of Students

Admins can now start a new application on behalf of a student directly from the student's profile. The Applications profile card includes a new Start New Application button that logs you into your application site as the student, even if the student has never created an account or started an application before.

Until now, Log in as User was only available on existing applications, so starting a brand-new application for a student required a data import. Your team can now begin applications for late additions, paper applicants, or students deferring to a future term in just a few clicks. Learn more in Start Applications on Behalf of Students.

Students Return to the Right Application Site

For schools that run multiple application sites for the same application, such as one site per campus location, Element451 now remembers which site each student registered from. Login links in autoresponder emails, magic links, and login tokens all take students back to the site they originally applied through, instead of falling back to a default site. Log in as User opens that same site, so staff see exactly what the student sees. Learn more in Students Return to the Right Application Site.

🚨 Important: This applies to new registrations only. Applications registered before August 11, 2026 do not have an origin site stored, so students returning to those applications continue to land on the default application site.

Import + Export for Alerts and Cases

Alert and case data is now fully supported in the Import + Export module. You can bulk import alerts and cases from a CSV file, SFTP, Dropbox, or Google Drive, and export them to any destination, using the same tasks you already use for other student data. Alert and case fields are mapped alongside contact fields within a standard task, so there is no separate task type to learn.

Records can be imported in a closed state, such as a resolved alert or a cancelled case, which makes it possible to migrate historical data from a legacy early-alert system on day one, or to keep an external system in sync on a schedule. Learn more in Import + Export for Alerts and Cases.

Fixes and Improvements

Applications + Decisions

  • Improved

    • Added tracking for the application site a student originally registered from, ensuring students return to the correct application site when re-entering via email links or login links.

  • Fixed

    • Resolved an issue where application document access permissions were not properly enforced in certain scenarios.

    • Resolved an issue where the decision checklist could crash when processing an invalid decision identifier.

    • Resolved an issue where high school graduation status and graduation year did not appear on submitted application PDFs. Application previews generated from this point forward include these fields; to refresh an older application, regenerate its preview document.

Appointments

  • Improved

  • Fixed

Bolt Agents for Students

  • Improved

    • Added a new @Hand Off action for Custom Skills, letting Bolt Agents route a conversation to a specific person, a team, a role, or a dynamic destination such as the contact's assignee, with a configurable fallback when the destination cannot be resolved.

    • Added a new @Share Entity action for Custom Skills, so Bolt Agents can send a student a specific document, form, landing page, or survey, or a link of your own. The destination arrives as a labeled button or link instead of a raw web address, and voice agents no longer read long addresses aloud.

    • Added optional start and end dates to the schedule restrictions in Custom Skill Availability, so a skill can be limited to a temporary window such as an event period, a seasonal campaign, or holiday coverage.

  • Fixed

    • Resolved an issue where a student requesting a real person in Messenger incorrectly triggered the content moderation flag, blocking the conversation.

    • Resolved an issue where the Hermes voice preview played the wrong audio sample, causing admins to hear an incorrect voice when previewing agent configurations.

    • Resolved an issue where category-based event skills did not return event-specific details, falling back to Knowledge Hub content instead of showing the expected event information.

    • Resolved an issue where an agent generated an incorrect URL instead of using the correct Knowledge Hub URL.

    • Resolved an issue where handing a conversation to a team assigned the team itself instead of an active team member, causing the assignee to display as a deleted user.

Bolt Agents for Staff

  • Improved

  • Fixed

    • Resolved an issue where chat responses containing multiple URLs collapsed into dense inline links, making them difficult to read.

Bolt Agent Jobs

  • Improved

  • Fixed

    • Resolved an issue where Bolt Agent messages did not follow format instructions, causing responses to display incorrectly.

    • Resolved an issue where jobs with "Any" selected for User Email Preference continued using a contact's primary email after a hard bounce instead of switching to an available alternative email address.

    • Resolved an issue where newly created surveys could be missing from the goal selection dropdown when a school had more than 50 surveys.

Bolt Discovery

  • Improved

  • Fixed

    • Resolved an issue where duplicate analysis reported a matching date of birth for a potential duplicate pair when one of the records had no date of birth on file.

Bolt Knowledge Hub

  • Improved

  • Fixed

Campaigns

  • Improved

  • Fixed

Case Management (Open Beta)

  • Improved

    • Case rules now include a case status updated trigger, plus an action to resolve the alerts related to that case.

    • When creating an alert for several students at once, you can now pick from the courses those students share.

    • Bolt Agent job activity now appears on alert and case timelines, and enrollment Action History entries added by a trigger link back to the alert or case that started them.

    • Reordered the alert status dropdown so terminal statuses appear after Escalate to Case.

    • Escalating an alert to a case now opens the case side sheet automatically.

    • The Have Agent Call Student action now defaults to the Bolt Agent as the caller.

    • Clarified Bolt Agent Job wording in Relate Existing Item.

  • Fixed

    • Resolved an issue where longer status names were cut off in the dropdown when updating a case status.

    • Resolved an issue where sorting by the Status column in the Cases table did not reorder cases.

Conversations

  • Improved

    • Enhanced security for inbound media handling.

  • Fixed

    • Resolved an issue where the Messenger icebreaker text shifted outside the chat bubble on mobile devices.

    • Resolved an issue where Messenger continued to address logged-out users by name on public sites such as Events pages.

    • Resolved an issue where the in-app calling settings toggle was not visible in some customer instances.

    • Resolved an issue where the text cursor jumped to the beginning of the message while typing.

    • Resolved an issue where the Messenger icebreaker text appeared partially cut off on partner websites.

    • Resolved an issue where internal users received conversation notifications for every incoming message, even without matching conversation routing rules.

    • Resolved an issue where anonymous Messenger conversations reset on a full page reload on Pages and Events sites, preventing students from continuing an existing conversation across pages.

    • Resolved an issue where the Messenger launcher could not be reached with a keyboard or announced by screen readers, preventing keyboard-only visitors from opening the chat.

Courses

  • Improved

    • The Courses card on contact profiles now shows the current course grade when a final grade is not yet available, giving staff in-term grade visibility without opening each enrollment.

  • Fixed

    • Resolved an issue where grade history dates displayed incorrectly on student records.

Data, Integrations + Insights

  • Improved

    • Improved the Canvas integration to prevent duplicate courses from being created during sync.

    • Improved website visitor tracking to work reliably even when Google Tag Manager is not fully installed on an external site.

    • Improved task exports to correctly include tasks listed on individual records.

  • Fixed

    • Resolved an issue where data source exports did not reflect the updated column order configured within the data source.

    • Resolved an issue where updating an import/export schedule displayed a generic error instead of specific validation feedback.

    • Resolved an issue where imported test scores were truncated, omitting the first digit of ACT scores.

    • Resolved an issue where page views on external websites were not recorded despite the tracking snippet loading successfully.

    • Resolved an issue where the Exact date filter returned zero results when the start and end dates were set to the same day.

    • Resolved an issue where grades imported through the Brightspace LMS connection displayed too many decimal places.

    • Resolved an issue where report access controls were not correctly scoped under certain conditions.

    • Resolved an issue where high school transcript status exports could return the value from the wrong school record when a contact had both high school and college entries.

Events

  • Improved

    • Increased the number of event registrations accepted from the same network in quick succession, so shared devices at on-site events are less likely to be temporarily blocked.

  • Fixed

    • Resolved an issue where setting an event message to "inactive" did not prevent it from being sent.

    • Resolved an issue where event attendee exports could become stuck when processing large attendee lists.

    • Resolved an issue where the event attendee export dialog did not display an error or timeout when the export failed, leaving it in a perpetual loading state.

    • Resolved an issue where multiple confirmation emails were sent for a single event registration.

    • Resolved an issue where recurring events displayed incorrect start and end dates in the list view.

    • Resolved an issue where the messaging recipient count included registrants from event dates that were not selected.

Forms

  • Improved

  • Fixed

    • Resolved an issue where the form builder displayed conditional required-if values as multi-value chips instead of a single text string.

    • Resolved an issue where a follow-up form's header did not display when the form was embedded on a page.

General

  • Improved

    • Updated the password reset dialog to clarify that reset emails are only sent for active accounts.

  • Fixed

    • Resolved an issue where Element's tracking setup caused external web pages to continuously reload, preventing visitors from reading page content.

    • Resolved an issue where date conditions were evaluated as the previous calendar day for institutions in time zones behind UTC, affecting campaign version conditions, conversation rules, and other date-based conditions.

Journeys

  • Improved

  • Fixed

Microsites

  • Improved

  • Fixed

Organizations

  • Improved

  • Fixed

Pages

  • Improved

  • Fixed

People

  • Improved

    • Added an active status filter for segments, allowing admins to include active, inactive, or all contacts when building segments.

    • Enhanced the duplicate review workflow so reviewers can open a student's profile without losing their place in the duplicate queue.

    • Improved label display in dropdowns so long label names are no longer cut off and can still be removed from profiles.

  • Fixed

    • Resolved an issue where the School ID identity appeared twice in the segment filter dropdown.

    • Resolved an issue where the source date saved as one day earlier than the date selected when manually adding a prospect.

    • Resolved an issue where admins could not filter People by Text Area, Upload, or Multiple Upload application custom fields.

    • Resolved an issue where the deduplication module displayed raw code instead of field values.

    • Resolved an issue where requests for a contact's emergency contacts returned student profile data instead of emergency contact information.

    • Resolved an issue where Recruit Status and Source data source mappings were unavailable in Athletics settings.

    • Resolved an issue where enrolled programs did not display on the contact profile and re-adding an enrolled program returned a validation error.

    • Resolved an issue where the three-dot action menu in segment folders was inaccessible when the folder name was too long.

    • Resolved an issue where a segment displayed more rows than the rows-per-page setting indicated, producing an empty extra page.

    • Resolved an issue where the Received Recommendation filter returned incorrect records when a segment used more than one recommendation condition.

Settings + Permissions

  • Improved

  • Fixed

    • Resolved an issue where users with restricted visibility groups set to "all" were incorrectly filtered out of segments.

StudentHub

  • Improved

  • Fixed

    • Resolved an issue where the self check-in feature was not working for events.

Surveys

  • Improved

  • Fixed

    • Resolved an issue where the survey response count in the survey list did not match the count shown in all-time statistics.

    • Resolved an issue where downloading survey response data did not include all recorded responses.

Tasks

  • Improved

  • Fixed

Workflows + Rules

  • Improved

  • Fixed

    • Resolved an issue where workflow date conditions evaluated the selected date in the wrong timezone.

    • Resolved an issue where a relative date condition in a workflow reverted to the previous day after saving.

    • Resolved an issue where workflow conditions evaluated inconsistently across records, causing some records to incorrectly meet or miss a condition.

    • Resolved an issue where a value could not be selected for application custom fields that use manually added options instead of an attached data source.

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