I’m trying to broadcast a poll to a Telegram channel using the Question “Ask a question” action but get this error when I view the broadcast details:
Error message: Bad Request: inline keyboard expected
Looks like Telegram supports polls: https://core.telegram.org/bots/api#sendpoll and the fields look similar to the “Ask a question” action.
Is it even possible to send polls/question to Telegram channels, and if so, why do I get this error message, and how can I resolve this?
Hi,
You’ll need to share your flow with support@flowxo.com so we can understand exactly what you’re doing that is producing that error. Is definitely possible to send a poll using a Make Custom Request action, but we do not currently process the poll responses as they arrive.
Nathan
Thanks for the quick response!
You can install the flow via https://flowxo.com/share/6dppn2vv.
The flow is called with a GET request with URL variable ‘channel’ to build the correct response path ({{receive_a_webhook.bot_id}}/c/{{receive_a_webhook.channel}}).
When I do the get request I get a 200 response which is correct. But when I look at the broadcast details in https://flowxo.com/app/broadcasts it gives a status “failed” with said error message.
Other actions like “Send a message” and “Send an image”, seem to work fine.
It looks to me like on the broadcasts that failed you didn’t specify any text for the question. I do see you have the question text set to Question? now - if that was always set that way, then maybe we have a weird bug where we don’t see the text “Question” as a question - unlikely but possible I suppose.
Or, you only recently set the question text to a non-empty string. In any case, please try the following:
Change the text of your question to something else, like “Here is a question”
Try your broadcast again
If it works, change your question text back to Question?
If it doesn’t work, let us know, we have a bug.
If it does work, maybe it wasn’t set properly before?
Nathan
The input was always set but changed it to be sure to “What’s the answer to the universe?” but the error persists. The “Question” param seems to still be empty:
There is definitely something strange going on - we’ll have to dig in a little deeper, but one thing I just realized is that you are using a Broadcast trigger and explicitly setting the Response Path - this is definitely not what you want to do, because a Broadcast Trigger will execute once per every user subscribed to your bot, but you will always be sending a message to the channel, so if you had 10 users, you would send 10 messages to the channel.
I doubt that is causing your problem, but even so could you set up your flow with a non-Broadcast Webhook Trigger and let me know the results.
Thanks,
Nathan
Ah, that makes sense. Made a new flow with a regular Receive Webhook trigger, but the problem persists: https://flowxo.com/share/png789kj, with the same error inline keyboard being expected.
Sending just a normal message in the same flow works fine.
Ok thanks - it was a bug, we were not sending inline keyboards when the destination was a channel, which is required by telegram - I believe that if you try it now, it should work.
Nathan
Also, if what you really want is to send a poll to your users, here is an example that accepts a webhook POST with a payload of { response_path:“xxx”, question:“xxx” } and sends a message, a normal question, and then a poll.
There is currently not a way for your bot to consume the poll results, but they are tabulated by Telegram and updated to the channel.
Cool, thanks for fixing so quickly. The link https://fxo-core.ngrok.io/share/rn73wyma seems to be broken though.
For anyone else wondering, I solved this by making an HTTP request to the sendPoll method from the Telegram API directly: https://core.telegram.org/bots/api#sendpoll.
Thanks for the support Nathan.
Nice work! Here’s a corrected link on how to do the same thing using a Custom Request:
Please see this newly released Telegram related feature - it will help you send polls, plus do many other things in Telegram without writing a bunch of custom requests: https://support.flowxo.com/article/257-telegram-actions. And here for customizing keyboards: https://support.flowxo.com/article/258-telegram-keyboards
