Hello, all.
I’m using Instagram API with ManyChat to answer messages from incoming users. After a couple of messages on Instagram, I ask for some informations from my client.
It’s basically, phone number, company name, e-mail, etc…
The problem is, and it’s a problem that makes my workflow not work at all, whenever I receive a phone number that uses the correct format (Ex: 41 9 9999 9999), Instagram generates a ‘Link Preview’ card, and ManyChat counts this card as ‘Unsupported Message Format’, but instead of ignoring it, it saves this value to the ‘Last Message Received’ instead of the actual phone number… And it’s empty. It does’nt save it as null, nan, nor anything that we can use a condition to ignore this…
If this card itself did’nt replace the last message in the flow, everything would work fine…
The biggest difficulty for us is that we are not able to access the previous messages from the clients, only the last ones, so we’re not able to get their phone numbers.
A few ideas that would completely solve this for us, is:
- Option to ignore unspupported/empty messages. A option to togle this on/off would be superb.
- Extra variables for previous messages, not just ‘Last Message Entry’, maybe ‘Second To Last Message Entry’ and etc.
- An API endpoint to fetch recent conversation history… This way, we could treat this business logic ourselves and do a workaround for it, using our own REST API at our side, at a code level.
In short, the issue is not the phone card itself, but the fact that it wipes out the last readable message in the flow, and this makes our business flow unusable.
If we could either skip those unsupported formats or access the last few messages, that would solve our problem.
Thanks for considering this, it would make ‘Instagram + AI’ use cases much more reliable for a lot of people.