CODEWITHSUNDEEP
facebook-messenger
machineghost
machineghost

Reputation: 35813

Facebook Messenger: Is it Possible to Initiate Chat With Parameters?

Back in the day Facebook used to let you define URLs that were something like http://facebook.com/send_a_message/user/55/pre_fill/Hi there. When you clicked that link Facebook would open up its Messenger with a "Hi there" message ready to be sent to user 55.

But then Facebook decided that "pre-filling" was bad, and outlawed it across all their APIs. Now there are a bunch of different ways to initiate a Messenger chat session, but they all amount to "start a chat with user 55", not "start a chat with user 55 using some information".

The thing is, I'd like to somehow pass information along with the link. For instance, I might want to have three different links on three different pages, and I want my chatbot to be able to respond differently based on which page the user came from. Since I can't "pre-fill" a message (eg. "Hello, I just came from page A"), I'm wondering if there is any other way to pass auxiliary information.

TLDR

I'm wondering if there's any way I can possibly provide a user with a link that, when they click it, starts up a chat session with my chatbot user, and somehow passes information to it. Using an intermediate proxy (ie. having the link go to my server, and then have my server start the chat somehow) would work, but only if I can associate the information with the user (ie. it doesn't help to know "page A" if I can't associate that with the user once they start chatting).

Upvotes: 4

Views: 287

Answers (1)

machineghost
machineghost

Reputation: 35813

After researching further it would appear that the answer to my question is no: there is currently no way to pass-along supplemental information.

But here's the good news: when I filed a bug about this (which it turns out I should have filed as a feature request, sorry Facebook) I got a response saying something to the effect of "we couldn't tell you that we are currently developing this, even if we were", which I'm going to optimistically choose to interpret as a sign hope means that this functionality may be coming in the future.

Upvotes: 1

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