Messages can be hard to keep track of, especially as your bot begins to grow! To make sure your messages are organised and easy to navigate, we recommend establishing a set of naming conventions to follow. This also makes sorting messages easier. Your naming convention can be totally decided by you, but we suggest these following ideas (from a lot of trial and error)!

It’s a good idea to think of the title of your messages as a tree to which you can add branches and leaves. The tree trunk would be the main, overarching topic, whilst the branches and leaves are categories within it. So the title begins with main aspect of the message, and progressively specifies what else is included by importance.

For example, say we were creating a set of messages for a television show. This is an example of what we would call our message:

S10E4 Challenges – The Last Ball On Earth

The trunk of the message is the season and episode. We always shorten this to save space, and to make it easier to search for (kind of like a code). The next part of the message refers to the category of the message, In this case, this message stems from the “challenges” section of a previous carousel. The final part of the name is the title of the challenge itself (there are usually two challenges per episode).

If your message is connected to a carousel card, it’s a good idea to include what card it’s from in the title. So for example, I’ve made a bot about my favourite colours and why I like them, with the main menu containing a carousel of three cards. The subsequent messages would be written along the lines of:

Red – It’s Vibrant
​Red – It Reminds Me of Autumn
​Blue – It Reminds Me of Oceans
​Blue – It’s Calming
​Gold – It’s Opulent
​Gold – You Can’t Miss It

The text before the hyphen denotes what part of the carousel the message came from, then the rest goes into detail about what the message contains.

Say you had a lot to say about how much you like red because it’s vibrant, so you needed three messages. We suggest numbering the messages to keep them organised. For example:

Red – It’s Vibrant 1
​Red – It’s Vibrant 2
​Red – It’s Vibrant 3

Every message should be numbered so you know it’s part of a set.
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It's a good idea to specify if your message is a broadcast or not. This can be easily done by adding a (Broadcast) or even (BC) to the end of the message. Just make sure it’s consistent.

Gold – You Can’t Miss It (Broadcast)
​Gold – You Can’t Miss It (BC)

If you have a specific message that you know you will want to find or edit frequently, you can put a simple AA in front of the message. For example:

AA Main Menu
​AA Episode Guide

This is a simple technique that makes searching for the message easier. Simply type AA into the search bar, or sort your messages alphabetically so it moves to the top.

Categories
Categories act as a extra layer of organisation – they’re a simple way of sorting messages so they stay within their sets. They’re also good for highlighting a specific type of content within the message i.e. “Keyword Response”. It’s a good idea to keep your categories to a minimum, so they act more as a sorting mechanism. Keep the content description to the message title itself.

For those who want a TLDR:
​– Keep it consistent
​– Keep it in title case
​– Keep it clear