with two days left it is important to note the changes that Facebook has made to Messenger bots with EU regulations.
Down below we wanted to summarize the most important Facebook EU limitations that will affect your Messenger bot so you know precisely what is happening from 16th of December and beyond.
WHO IS AFFECTED by these Facebook EU Limitations?
- All FB pages in Europe
- All pages with FB European page admins
- Pages with EU subscribers
How is each being affected?
- FB pages in Europe. No matter if you have subscribers inside or outside of Europe, you will have the restrictions placed that will be discussed in a bit down below.
- All pages with European FB page admins. Because one of the page admins is from Europe the entire page will get the restrictions, no matter if the subscribers are outside the EU. Workaround could be to temporarily remove the admin from the page.
- Pages with EU subscribers. These will partially be effected. Restrictions are only applied to the subscribers that reside in the EU and will remain working normally with the subscribers outside this region.
WHAT ARE THE CHANGES/ LIMITATIONS AS OF THIS POINT?
We are only to give you the changes that apply to our platform. There are some limitations on API calls we do not use so there is no use in letting you know about these since that will not be of any value to you.
- Regular buttons not being displayed on desktop. Normal buttons will not be rendered on desktop view but will continue to work on mobile devices. Reasons for this limitation is not very clear as the same kind of data will be collected no matter the device the user is on.
Quick replies and user input multiple choice type will work as normal on both devices.
Do note that this will also mean you have no buttons with website type on desktop nor are you able to render Google sheets properly if buttons are attached.
For the best user experience we suggest to mention to the user to use mobile if possible.
If you need to be able to send people to website pages you can also insert the link directly into the text block as this will render a link for the subscriber to press on
- All attachments except images will fail. You will not be able to send or receive attachments other than images.
If you want to give such an attachment you can provide it by uploading it to your website for example and provide the URL inside the text block as this will render a link for the subscriber to press on. - One Time Notification (OTN) will not render. Old OTN will still show but cannot be pressed anymore. New OTN will not render at all.
This means you will not be able to reach your subscriber outside the 24-hour window anymore except for the 3 available Messenger tags. Do note that this can only be used for their intended use cases. More info can be found by reading the developers docs or here. - Typing indicator will not be visible anymore. It is not clear why this has been implemented but the typing indicator will not render in the Messenger conversation. We made adjustments in our backend system to convert these into waiting blocks instead so you as user will not be affected by any generated errors.
- Ref parameters will not work. You will not be able to use REF parameters/URL anymore. This also means that you will not be able to save payloads into custom fields because of this limitation.
An option would be to export data into Google Sheets and get that data into the subscribers custom fields using the get row data action. - Persistent menu will not work. Although the API call will succeed the persistent menu will not be loaded for the subscriber.
We advise to provide keyword trigger like “menu” to trigger a menu flow to show the options instead - Personas are no longer supported. You will no longer be able to create or use personas. No current workaround for it.
- PSID Matching will not work. This has some impact because this also means we cannot import subscribers from other platforms into SilFer Bots except for one and that will be ManyChat. This because we get the data from ManyChat through their API.
There currently is no workaround for other platforms unfortunately. - Custom labels are gone. The impact this will have for SilFer Bots users is that you no longer will be able to sync your tags with the custom labels inside the page inbox. So that functionality between SilFer Bots is gone for the moment
- Guest user chat upgrade option is removed. Normally when a user opts into the live chat widget on a website they get the option to login to their Facebook account to sync the conversation. This option has been removed.
What did we do from our end?
We made a lot of internal changes in the backend system to prevent flows from not rendering properly or generating errors.
For example all typing blocks have been rendered into waiting blocks so no errors are being generated.
We also provided a new condition that will let you check whether or not a subscriber is subject to EU rules or not.
That looks like this;
Do note for pages that are in Europe this rule is not really important since the restriction will applied to all its subscribers, no matter if they are in or outside the EU region.
We will update this article soon as new changes have been made to keep you all updated.
If you have any questions feel free to reach out to us in the community group