Who are my users in a broadcast?

#1

Hi,
I tested broadcast using the ‘news feed’ template, for Telegram. Just changed the rss channel.
Reading the log, I find only 3 users receiving a push card message. No mistakes in the log. No filters were set.
I know that I have more than 3 beta testers or users who contacted the bot in the past, some of them have been excluded. Why?

Is there any way I could list the users which will be included in the broadcast and the ones excluded, and know the reasons why some of them are in or out?

Will any user saying a simple “hello” to my bot at Telegram be automatically included in the list for such feed?

Thank you.

(Daniel Beckett) #2

Hi Kiko,

When a user talks to your bot you’ll have their response path. The broadcast will broadcast to all users unless you use filters (are you using a filter?).

Have you disconnected and reconnected your bot? Each response path is a connection to your bot. If you reconnect this changes the response path. This means that your content is only sent to users who have spoken to your bot after a new connection. Do you think that is what’s happened here?

Thanks.
Dan

#3

Hi Dan
Thank you for your quick answer.
No I was not using filters. And yes, may be, I am not sure but,… may be I disconnected the bot in the past.

I understand that storing response paths at Google Sheets or MySQL will be no solution to avoid the lost… as response paths will change after reconnection!
But also understand that it is recommendable recording them if I will want to use them in a flow (filtering) it in the future, because I suppose (just because you provided no answer about this) that there is no way to list my users response paths and rest of details (i.e. Telegram userID and name) stored at Flow XO.

Suggested, and I hope you agree this will help us:

  1. Flow XO alerting us about the possible lost of information (what else?) when trying to disconnect a bot. A doble question is not enough when you don’t know the consequences.
  2. Flow XO keeping response path of the users whenever the bot is temporarily disconnected. After all, I did not delete de bot, so there is no reason to ‘forget’ information, in my opinion.

And an optional 3. To provide an access to our bots’ users database inside Flow XO. I suppose that you will say that the 3rd one is up to us, using flows i.e. to get MySQL, but, you know, that increases the number of steps in our flows. It is already in the logs, therefore, why not providing a full and more confortable access to them? :pray:

Thank you
Kiko

(Daniel Beckett) #4

Hi Kiko,

Thanks for this suggestion. We’re definitely going to be adding a warning for this in one of the upcoming updates.

Just to be clear, this issue won’t be caused by a user disconnecting or deleting your bot. It’s only caused when you remove the connection to your bot at the top of your FlowXO account. This is because a response path is unique to a bot and channel, indicating where a reply should be routed back to. When you disconnect and reconnect the bot a new connection is made with a different response path. Once the initial connection is made, the user’s response path remains the same unless it is disrupted as above.

You can store Attributes or send Metadata to capture/display user information.

Once again, thanks for the suggestion. :+1: I’m not sure if any kind of database view will be implemented but an option to export logs is a feature that may be possible for future updates, it’s not something currently on the development roadmap though. This is something a few users have suggested now.

Hope that all makes sense, let me know if you have any questions. :slightly_smiling_face: