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Another possible undocumented change

  • February 24, 2026
  • 5 replies
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Another one of our automation scripts broke yesterday. This time, the one that posts Product Updates to the community. Previously, when posting to the API to create a product update, you would need to parse the returned value to get the new ID. This was done by splitting it by “/” (forward slash) and grabbing the fourth item. I unfortunately don’t have an example of what exactly that looked like. The change that occurred last night, it now returns an object with id and publicid fields. While I do think this is a good change and how it should have been done the entire time, I can’t get behind these changes happening seemingly at random, causing our automations to break. Maybe I missed it, totally possible, but I did search my emails and the community and didn’t see any mention of this change..

 

Snippet from our script on how it retrieved the id previously:

Here’s what the returned result looks like now:

 

So, please keep this change, but also let folks know in advance if these types of changes are happening. Again, I may have missed it, and if so, I do apologize for the post.

Best answer by Larry

Hi ​@ndollimo_bt, first off, I take full ownership of this. I’m the Product Manager who introduced this change, and the lack of documentation/notice is on me.

You’re spot on that the move to returning an object with id and publicid is the 'right' technical path forward, but I clearly missed the mark on the communication side. I’m currently working with our team to ensure the Customer Communities API docs are updated immediately.

To ​@DannyPancratz's point: we are looking into how we can better bridge the gap between engineering updates and community notifications so these 'silent' breaks stop happening. Thank you for the patience while we get this sorted!

    5 replies

    samanthahamlet
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    • samanthahamlet
    • Gainsight Community Manager
    • February 24, 2026

    Hey ​@ndollimo_bt 

    I’ve now flagged this and we are checking internally. Hope this helps! 😊

      DannyPancratz
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      • DannyPancratz
      • VIP ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
      • February 24, 2026

      ​@ndollimo_bt First, I want to validate how you feel about this 100%. As a fellow customer I rely on 200+ automatons any unexpected changes that break those are incredibly difficult. 

      Adding some context that may be helpful. We face this same challenge at my company: the API docs being updated without notification or communication. It’s not a good customer experience; full stop. 

      Something I learned in trying to address this at my company is that our API docs are auto generated by an integration with the actual engineering work that creates/updates the APIs. There’s no intermediary step where a person is writing the docs, updating, or approving them. We use an open source solution that I was told is pretty standard and seems to be the exact same one Gainsight is using for CC.

      So that’s ☝️ (likely) the why behind these things happening. If I had to guess, this type of thing is going to get worse as AI adoption in software engineering automates / autogenerates even more of this kind of thing. 

      Hopefully Gainsight can identify a way to improve our experience as customers. I would love to follow their lead and use any best practices they demonstrate for communicating out these changes (if not in advance of, at least in tandem with the changes so that we don’t have to investigate what happened). 

        L
        • Larry
        • Gainsight Employee ⭐️
        • Answer
        • February 25, 2026

        Hi ​@ndollimo_bt, first off, I take full ownership of this. I’m the Product Manager who introduced this change, and the lack of documentation/notice is on me.

        You’re spot on that the move to returning an object with id and publicid is the 'right' technical path forward, but I clearly missed the mark on the communication side. I’m currently working with our team to ensure the Customer Communities API docs are updated immediately.

        To ​@DannyPancratz's point: we are looking into how we can better bridge the gap between engineering updates and community notifications so these 'silent' breaks stop happening. Thank you for the patience while we get this sorted!

          N
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          • ndollimo_bt
          • Author
          • Contributor ⭐️⭐️
          • February 26, 2026

          Appreciate the responses!

            L
            • Larry
            • Gainsight Employee ⭐️
            • February 26, 2026

            Just as a heads up, we’ll be rolling out communication about this in the community and we’ve made our support team aware of what to look out for. Going forward, we will prepare this and notify before we roll out!

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