What a bot is and how to switch it on

A bot is a ready-made conversation with your follower: someone writes your code word, leaves a comment or taps “Start”, and from there the bot greets them, optionally checks the follow and hands over what you promised. You are not sitting in the chat — the bot works, and you see the result in “Chats” and “Contacts”, with the numbers on the bot’s card.

What a bot is made of

• An account. The Instagram account or Telegram bot the conversation runs from. It comes from “Connections”, and if you do not have one yet — or need a different one — you can connect it right on the “Account” step, without leaving the wizard.
• Triggers — what starts the bot: a comment under a post, a direct message, the “Start” button, someone opening your link. A bot can have several triggers and starts on any of them.
• Messages — the welcome with a button, the “if not subscribed” message, the message with the gift, the reminder and the follow-up.
• Additional settings — the reminder, the follow-up and the point at which the bot considers itself finished. See Additional settings.

You fill all of this in the wizard: it walks you through step by step, and on the right (on a phone — via the button in the top right) you see what the chat will actually look like.

Creating a bot

1. Open “Bots” and tap “Create a bot” (in the app — the round “+” in the top right corner).
2. Pick a template. There are three of them — see Three templates.
3. Go through the wizard steps. The header shows where you are: “Step 1 of 7”.
4. Tap “Create”. The bot appears in your list.

Every field in the wizard is required — the only one you may skip is “Welcome image”. If something is missing, the wizard highlights the fields and says: “Fill in the highlighted fields and we will move on.”

Switching a bot on and off

A new bot switches itself on right after it is created — you land in the “Bots” list and see it starting. Every card in the list shows “on” or “off”. To flip it, tap “⋯” on the card and choose “Turn on” or “Turn off”. On a phone — in the app and on the site — open the bot and flip the “On” switch, or pick the same item in the “⋯” menu at the top of the page.

One thing worth knowing about switching off: while the bot is off users can still write to it — but when you switch it back on, it will not answer the backlog. It only answers what arrives after it was turned on. This is deliberate: otherwise someone would get a reply to a message they sent a week ago.

If a bot fails to start, the card says why: “Some steps of the bot have errors — open it and fix them”, “You are out of tokens. Top up your balance and the bot will start.”

What else is in the “⋯” menu

• “Edit” — open the wizard and change your answers: it opens straight on the fields, the intro screen is not shown when editing. Saving rebuilds the bot from your answers.
• “About” — the bot’s name, description and folder.
• “Duplicate” — a copy of the bot as a switched-off draft: handy when you need the same bot for another post or another code word.
• “Delete bot” — for good. Collected contacts and chats stay. If finishing this bot starts any chains, the “Delete the bot?” question names them: “This bot starts the chains: “…”. After deletion they will not start” — with a “Delete anyway” button. More than three chains — the count and the first three are named.

Bot folders

You create the folders yourself: “Account” → “Settings” → “Folders” → “Bots”, or with the gear on the folder bar of the “Bots” page (on a wide screen — the “Folder settings” row on the left, under the folders). There you can also rename them and recolour them. Tap “Edit” and you can reorder the folders by dragging a row: the order you set here is the order of the folder bar above the “Bots” list. You can delete a folder in the same place; the bots of a deleted folder stay where they are, just without a folder. The “Hide folders” button removes the folder bar from the “Bots” list and keeps the folders themselves. A folder without bots stays in the bar too: open it and you will see “Nothing here yet”.

You attach a bot to a folder in “About”: the first row of the folder list is “Add a folder” — a new folder is picked for the bot right away.

The same “Folders” group holds the folder settings of “Chats” and “Contacts” — those open their own sections.

One user, one bot

If you have several bots on one account, exactly one of them answers each message, and which one is decided by clear rules. See Launch rules — including why you cannot have two bots on the same code word.

While a user is talking to a bot, no other bot picks them up: the conversation belongs to the one that started it. It ends when the conversation is over or when the user stays silent longer than the period set in “Additional settings” — 24 hours by default.