Has anybody yet a way to interact with an FB messenger bot without using real FB accounts? I want to do automated testing and obviously not use real accounts for that.
I was not able to figure out how to allow access to a page to 'test users' or create a test page and subscribe the test app to it.
Any ideas on how to do this?
I use a wee web app I made to act as a local version of the facebook messenger api server and run user actions.
https://github.com/Fraser-Greenlee/bot_tester
On it you can write a script to define new users and their actions.
From the Facebook developers dashboard, select your app and then Roles. From Roles you can add other Facebook users as test users. It was easiest for me to use the users facebook id. Adding by email did not always work for me.
I am not aware of how to access a Facebook bot without a Facebook account. I created several fake accounts and had my friends test the bot. After testing, I deleted the fake accounts.
For more information on setting up a bot see my article Facebook Bots for Fun and Profit
The example bot is DMS Software Bot
The source code is Github fb-robot
Testing fb bot with non-fb user is currently not supported. Following are the reasons:
fb messenger requires the user to be logged
fb creates page scope ids (PSID) for each user who is interacting with the bot and hence login on fb is required
Coming to your question on testing:
you can add fb users as tester to your page and your app. Explained here. For your app https://developers.facebook.com/apps/[app-id]/roles/
Once added they will be able to send message to your bot (page) from messenger
On another note, if you are using 3rd party apps to build your bot (eg: api.ai, wit.ai) they already have emulators within the app which makes testing easier.
One easy way to achieve automated testing for messenger bots atleast is to try to mimic a request coming from FB. You can just log the request you are getting to your bot to find the signature of the request that FB sends. Then you can just pretend to be FB by sending http requests with the same signature. You will also have to add in code to respond to these http requests with your reply instead of just sending the message to FB's send API.
So in node it would be something like
sendMessage(<your reply>);
res.send(<your reply>);
Now you have an automated way of sending and receiving messages which you can use for automated testing.
However I think the bigger challenge is coming up with enough test cases. You need to use a combination of clustering over available data and classification to generate new cases.
I have been working on a tool to make this easy. So if you are interested you can sign up for early access. http://ozz.ai
Related
I have a question about connecting my app, made with Flutter, with the Instagram API.
I want the user to register with their account, store the access token and then send a post to the API to publish a comment or add a like.
Can I do this with Flutter or do I need to use a different language like Python?
I checked the API documentation that Instagram provides and it seems that you can only do read-only requests (liking a post might not be possible).
The API you mentioned in your tags will not work with personal accounts, as Instagram states:
The API cannot access Instagram consumer accounts (i.e., non-Business or non-Creator Instagram accounts). If you are building an app for consumer users, use the Instagram Basic Display API instead.
You can try to use the mentioned Basic Display API instead, but mind you won't be able to author any posts or do actions in behalf of the user. To circumvent this, you might have to reverse-engineer the frontend facing portion of Instagram but I won't go into that.
To come back to your question, Flutter is well able to send network requests as mentioned here, but you still have a long way until you have functioning access to Instagram (check the Getting Started).
I have a website where users log in with Facebook. Right now there's no way for users to contact each other.
I was thinking of building a dedicated live messenger with sockets, but I wonder if there's an easier way to allow them to send messages to each other's Facebook Messanger, since they are already logged in with facebook.
There is no API for a chat between two users. Everything in Messenger API is focused on communication between a user and a page.
At most you can use the Send dialog to let a user send a link to their friends, but that requires the user actively using the button, you can not “automate” that; and handling the result will have nothing to do with your site any more, everything after that will happen in messenger only. https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/reference/send-dialog
I have seen services advertising that they can message the followers of pages and accounts on Facebook. I have gone over lots of different Facebook API's and several interesting threads on here but cant find a definitive answer.
Is is possible to directly message via a bot users who like a page providing obviously we have a valid admin token for that page?
Is is possible to directly message via a bot users who like a page
No, that is not possible.
All communication via the Messenger platform API (basis for “bots” in Facebook terminology) requires that the user initiates it.
And it would probably be considered spam by most people - just because I liked your page, does not mean I want to be contacted by you in any way beyond that. Posting to your page is the designated way of communicating with the people that follow your page.
I am building a facebook messenger bot. And the bot is giving user ids. But it is not clear to me if the messenger ids are the same ids that would be returned if I use the same app and add to it a login feature. Because we already have an app and has a login feature, now we need to build a facebook bot and identify the already existing users in our db that are using the bot.
I have read facebook tutorial about linking 2 different applications to the same business to get consistent ids. But what if I use that same application to login users AND for messengers (by using the add products to the application, and so having one application, one app id) would that work? Would I be getting the same user ids?
PS: I would test myself but I am in an awkward position where the page/database/login app owner is a different person, and they are not big on sharing data, and I am supposed to blindly write a messenger code that is supposed to work when they deploy it.
All help is appreciated, thank you.
You need to use Facebook's ID Matching APIs for this purpose:
Here is the details: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/messenger-platform/identity/id-matching
I have the task to integrate some commercial sharing stuff into a website.
The idea is that the user a) logs in/registers in the website, b) the user connects his user account with his facebook account - by adding and accepting the website application.
Here comes the interesting part - is there a way of linking the facebook account with my website's account so that I can send them updates and promotions directly to their walls programatically?
In the application dialog, it's clearly noted that the user allows the application to write to the user wall so they accept and agree this. Then, for example, if I want to send them a promotion or update directly on their wall using the fb application api, how can I achieve this? All the tutorials I've read consider the user using the Facebook Login
The concrete idea is something like weekly promotion feed that my clients want to allow customers to allow being posted directly on their walls. As I don't have any experience with facebook development, I'd appreciate knowing how, if at all possible, this can be achieved?
Most of what you're suggesting is against policy, and isnt' technically possible either as users need to come back to the app once every 60 days for you to have a valid access_token for them.
The Authentication docs explain how to get access to a user's information with their permission, and the Permission documentation explains which permissions grant access to which functions or fields.