How to delete a VICIdial filter

Deleting a Lead filter in VICIdial is deliberately a little slow, and that is on purpose. A Filter can be wired into the dialing of several campaigns and users at once, so removing one is a step you do not want to take by accident. The delete flow asks you to confirm twice before anything is actually gone.

Check who is using it first

Before you delete anything, make sure no live Campaign or user still points at the filter. If a campaign references a filter that no longer exists, its lead pull can misbehave — at best the filter silently stops applying, and your agents start dialing a wider pool than you intended. So the safe order is: find every place that uses the filter, swap it to a different filter or to none, and only then delete.

• Check each campaign that might carry the filter and clear or replace it.
• Check any individual user who had the filter set on their account.
• Confirm nothing in your Lead list workflow depends on it before removing.

The two-step delete

flowchart TD
  A[Open the filter modification page] --> B[Click DELETE THIS FILTER]
  B --> C[Page reloads with a confirm link]
  C --> D[Click DELETE THIS FILTER again]
  D --> E[Filter is removed from the system]

Open the filter on its modification page and scroll to the bottom. There you will find a DELETE THIS FILTER link. Click it once and nothing is gone yet — the page reloads with a confirmation link at the top. Click the second DELETE THIS FILTER link to actually remove the filter. Two clicks, two separate page states, and the filter is gone for good. The pause between them is your chance to back out if you clicked the wrong row.

If the delete link is not showing at all, the option may be disabled for your account by an admin. That is a permissions setting, not a bug — a manager with the right access can remove the filter for you. It is a sensible guardrail in a busy shop, where you might not want every admin able to wipe a filter other teams rely on.

When deleting is the right call

Because you cannot rename a Filter ID, delete-and-recreate is the normal way to fix a badly named filter. It is also the cleanup step after a campaign retires, or when an old A/B test filter on a particular Lead source has served its purpose. In each case the routine is the same: detach it everywhere, then run the two-step delete.

If you only need to change the rule rather than scrap the filter, modifying it instead is usually the better move. For where filters sit in the wider picture, the quality-control guide covers the full setup, and the QC setup walkthrough shows the surrounding call-quality configuration.

VICIfast runs a managed VICIdial box where managing filters is right in the admin from the start, live in under 40 seconds. See our plans and pricing.