To make sure your messages are organised and easy to find, 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!)

The messages for your bot can be found under the messages section of the platform.

All of your bot's messages will be accessible in this part of the platform as you build and edit your bot. Messages are shown in a list and can be organised by categories, title or last updated. For example, this is the message list for a survey bot. From the list, you can easily see that the bot contains seven messages and is organised by most recently updated.

As you build your bot, it's important to keep your messages organised and clearly titled so they're easy to find. This is especially important if you are building larger bots or working on a bot with other collaborators.

When you create a message, you will be asked to title it under the "Set message title" section.

The title won't be seen by the bot user. It is here to help you locate the message in your message list. We recommend keeping your message titles clear and straightforward, so it's easy for you and other bot builders to recognise messages from your message list.

So for example, let's go back to the survey bot. I titled the message containing question one of my survey "Q1".

This is a perfectly suitable message title. However, you may want to include the question in the title itself so you can easily reference which question is in each message at a glance. If that's the case, you can simply edit your message and add in the question.

Now, you can see the questions in your survey at a glance in your message list. Adding extra detail to your message is especially helpful when collaborating with others on a bot, as it will save each person having to click into individual messages to help find specific content.

When building more complex bots, 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 sub-topics within it. So the title begins with main aspect of the message, and progressively specifies what else is included by importance.

Let's start off with the welcome message as an example. Your welcome message acts as an intro to your bot and more often than not has one or multiple calls to action. To make it easier to follow which messages are stemming from your welcome message, you can word your message titles as below:

You can then easily see which messages are stemming from the original message. In this case, I can easily see that the response is to a user replying "maybe later" to if they want to bot to contact them at a different time. You don't have to follow this route through the whole flow of the bot, just specific sections so they're tidily grouped together in your list. This works especially well if you organise your messages by title (alphabetical order).

For another example, let's say we're building a guide to all the groups on our Workplace instance. The bot is made up of topics and FAQs organised into menus and submenus (built in carousels). The title of the message which contains the topline carousel will contain the main topic. From there, the message title can contain the topics and content based on what the user clicked. Here is an example of how the "Tips & Tricks" section of the Workplace Guide would be laid out:

In this case, this specific flow starts with the “Tips & Tricks” intro message so that will make up the trunk of the message title. Any content now linked to that message will fall under the title "Tips & Tricks - {content based on what the user clicked}". So the "Chat tips" button settings in the topline carousel will be connected to "Tips & Tricks - Chat Tips" message. 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. You can keep doing this if there are more submenus throughout the messages.

You may find that you want to specify if a message is a broadcast or a keyword, in order to make it easier to set up broadcasts or keywords. This can be easily done by adding a (Broadcast) or even (BC) to any part of the message:

Survey Intro (Broadcast)

Survey Nudge (Broadcast)

With broadcasts, it may even be suitable to include extra info such as the date or timezone. This is really helpful if you are sending out a lot of broadcasts to multiple timezones. For example:

Survey Intro - 13/2/2022- LATAM (Broadcast)

Survey Nudge - 16/2/2022 - LATAM (Broadcast)

You could also include the time. This title process works really well if you are creating event bots and need pings about specific content to go out at specific times.

With keywords, you could include the keyword triggers within your title so it's easy to track what the content is referencing. For example the message title for a keyword message about vacation policy could be:

Categories help you organise your messages. Please note that categories are optional.

Categories can 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.

You can also use categories as notes to yourself or other bot builders. Say you had a message that needed to be updated later down the line. You could add in the category "To edit" or similar in order to make it clear that there is content to update within the message. Once the message has been updated, you can easily remove the category. Think of it as a post-it note of sorts!

So that's out top tips on how to approach naming your messages. If you have any questions, or want to share tips of your own, then hit us up on Intercom!