I am building a ruby on rails project. it is a portal. I have a situation as follows:
the user browses around. Suddenly he gets a doubt.
I want to keep a small text box and a button that says "call me".
To clarify the doubt the user can enter his phone number in the "call me" box.
now the back office personnel should get an alert or a notification about this.
I tried implementing juggernaut, but became a nightmare since the site is in a shared host and i couldn't configure the port.
a. An ugly solution, with pooling:
Why not make a page that autorefreshes every 1 sec (for the backoffice staff) that just pools the table with customer requests for new data? So, one controller that stores that phone request (the telefone number, etc) and one admin controller that displays unread phone requests from the DB.
It is simple to implement, does not consume too many resources.
b. if you really want something that should 'ring', you can integrate a SMS gateway and send a message to a backoffice phone number.
SO thread about SMS GW
Why not just sending an email to the backoffice?
Related
Is it possible to maintain both group text messages and single text messages with users and keep them separate? I understand there is no concept of a group message per se, but wanted to see if any recent advances in tech has made this possible with Twilio or other providers.
In short, I am creating a POC where a user inside an iOS App can send invoke an API call to my backend application. This application receives a phone number from someone's contact list, and then connects to Twilio to send the SMS message to that target user.
When the user replies, I was researching Twilio Web hooks to receive the message, and then save it in the database. The originating user, then, would be able to see the message on a screen.
I would guess that when a user responds to the twilio message, the only metadata that comes in is their message and phone number, so the "foreign key" is the phone number.. Thus when I save it in my database, I have their phone number and message.
This works up until someone decides to target two or more people in an SMS message using my API, and then target one of those people individually. For example they select me as a sole recipient, and then select me and someone else as a group text message.
In this case, how could my system/Twilio differentiate between if I was responding to the group message, or to the single message?
Any ideas or work arounds? Maybe another technology? Thanks!
I wanted to provide an answer to this in case anyone else was looking into this.
Essentially you pay 3 cents (0.03) per month per active user in each group. Basically you buy phone numbers for each group chat you need.
https://www.twilio.com/conversations/pricing
So if you're doing a million group chats obviously it can get costly, but for simple POCs this isn't the end of the world.
Enjoy!
I have a Dialogflow and Twitter integration and all seems to be working fine, except for one scenario.
I have an intent that is looking for negative statements from tweets that mention the Twitter user linked to the Dialogflow integration (lets call it #Target). The purpose of this is to then reply back with a Twitter direct message (DM) link, inviting the person to engage in conversation to further explore their problem.
The scenario steps that do not work are:
Send Tweet to #Target saying for example "Your service is really bad". At this point, the output context is "negative-sentiment" if DF recognises it.
If that is the case, DF then sends back a response with a link that will allow the user to open up a DM session to further explain their issue. In this example they may have a gas supply issue.
The user opens the link in the tweet reply to start the DM.
At this point, I am looking for an explanation of the issue, for example "My gas supply has been cut off". However, if I do that, it does not recognise the intent. I have to at this point re-enter the phrase "Your service is really bad" to get it to register the "negative-sentiment" context, then I can move on.
What does work, is if I start with a DM stating "Your service is really bad", followed by "My gas supply has been cut off". It's almost as if clicking on the reply to tweet either forgets the context or its actually a different DF session that is created once we fall into the DM.
So, has anyone seen this behaviour before? Thank you in advance for your replies.
When you attempt to switch from #mentions to DMs on Twitter keep in mind the sessions don't carry over (they are separate sessions) so what you'll need to do going forward is keep track of usernames on the backend in order to connect the two distinct sessions.
I'm writing a simple mini-chat with custom User model and authentication via omniauth. The chat uses web-socket faye-rails to send and display messages instantly without refreshing the page. The matter is that I'd like to add private messages - I mean, that I can choose an user and start our own dialog in a secondary chat window. I've looked for the solutions, but everything I found was about e-mailing - with inbox messages, trash cans and so on. So I wonder if there's any solution easy to implement.
The source code of my chat is here
Welcome to push technology and active web design!
When someone logs in, present them with a list of friended accounts and logged in state. For logged in friends, they can select a friend from the list and start a chat session in a new window. For logged out friends, they can send a message that's delivered the next time the recipient logs in.
You'll then have to create a friending mechanism that allows a user to request a connection to a prospective friend, be notified of pending connection requests, approve friend requests, and an unfriend feature. Hopefully that one won't be used too often.
I've worked with Faye & I like Faye but also take a quick look at the beta release of Rails 5. Action Cable will do the same thing and the framework support is better.
After registration, our app prompts users to invite her friends (aka phone contacts) to use the app too. This allows us to send an email/sms to the useer's contacts with some sort of invitation key. Works fine for a web version app, just embed the key in the url you provide in the invitation.
I'm having trouble figuring out how to make this work smoothly with IOS only. It would be brilliant if I could send the invitee a link to appstore.apple.com/myapp?registrationKey=abcXYZ and have the key magically available to my app once it's installed, but I guess this is a lot to hope for?
The obvious way around this is to make the user manually enter their registration key on first launch, but this seems less reliable and (to my mind) adds friction to the UX.
Has anybody come up with something clever to get around this?
Here is what is flowing through my brain on how to solve this solution, please note, I have not vetted, psudeo-coded, coded, or applied this theory.
Since you will know who is being sent an invitation, save that data to your database with a relationship to the user sending and a unique id to the user being invited (email address if its in the contact's card). When new users sign up scan the database for invitations, if one is found present it to the user asking We're you referred by <existing user>? Once the new user selects their response continue through the registration process, updating the relationship table accordingly and applying any extra settings you need to for the referral.
This combines automatic referral tracking with referral codes for a basic, straight-forward, almost (but not quite) fool proof method to make sure referrals are linked to the right users.
As far as I can tell, the App Store provides an information firewall between an invitation and the installed app.
The closest workaround I've seen is the following:
email link sends you to your website
the website logs reference information in the URL and the IP address
the website instantly redirects you to the App Store (if iOS detected)
user installs the app
user loads the app
app contacts your website, IP addresses matched ... BINGO
Obviously not a secure method though.
There are many failure cases:
business networks commonly share IPs
home and mobile networks release and reuse IPs
The more is frequently used to resolve cases where its good enough to know that the user 'almost-certainly' was referred to download app by the email.
For example, it can be a good mechanism to prompt the user with a "who do you know" question in an app and limit the options based on the (IP+reference) data. If they pick the original poster, then maybe that's good enough, and then you can attach any other data that the inviter provided.
(Full disclosure, currently work at Branch)
The best solution to this is to fingerprint a user. This requires you to do the following steps:
For each user, using your own domain, generate a link for said user. So, right when they complete registration, generate their unique URL, that contains the invitation key.
For anyone clicking this link, they will redirect to Safari first. When they do, capture their IP address and iOS operating system version from the headers and user-agent.
Save this data on your server, and set window.location to your iTunes url.
If the user downloads and consequently opens, inside AppDelegate.m, send a message to your server with the IP address + major/minor/min version you collect upon app launch. If it matches with what you have on the server, you can now pass that invitation key back to the new user.
It's not perfect, and has the ability to misattribute. You could also use branch.io, where all of this is taken care of (link-generation, fingerprinting a user, attribution). Branch also drops a first party cookie and ties it with the device level ID, so attributions are much more accurate.
I'm developing my first iOS app and I'm facing a challenge.
I'd like to present new users a personalized screen when the app starts at the first time. Let me explain more.
The flow should be more or less like this:
My app isn't installed on the user's device.
Then the user gets an SMS on his iPhone with a short message and a link to install my app. The message is part of a conversation. Another user of this app had sent this message (through my backend) in order to join this user to the conversation.
This install URL doesn't necesarrily link directly to the itunes store, it can link to a conversations specific link such as myapp.com/conv/12345
The page at myapp.com/conv/* will detect the device and if it's an iPhone would redirect the user to the appstore to install myapp.
The user then installs myapp and launches it.
Now I'd like to present the same conversation 12345 to the user, before he even needs to login, register or what have you. That's the difficult part... I don't want the user to start an a blank page, I'd like to take it right to the conversation 12345 page.
I assume steps 1-5 are easy, but I can't think of a way to implement 6. I admit that I'm not familiar enough with the intrinsic of the appstore but as far as my understanding goes, "all apps are made equal", I mean the app itself when it gets installed it has no context, it doesn't know what "caused" it to be installed, it isn't aware of the click on myapp.com/conv/12345. Is this correct?
If there was a way for an app to know something like a referrer URL for the instllation or something along these lines that would be awesome.
If there was a way for app to query the device for its phone number
then I could make this work (b/c the SMS was sent to a specific phone
number, so I can track the most recent conversation sent to this
number on my backend). But since apps are sandboxed, accessing the phone
number is off limit.
Well, I suppose I could ask the user to type a unique code from the SMS when the
app starts, say 12345 and then I'd be able to display the
conversation to him. But that's problematic in two ways, first,
security - the user can join a conversation not meant
for him, and second, that's less than optimal
user experience, I want this to work like magic, I don't want to make
users memorize and type strings into my app the first time they
install, I'm sure they won't appreciate it... (they could
copy-paste, but still...)
Another option is asking the user to type his phone number. But that
again has a few drawbacks, one is that again it's less than optimal
UX, I'm asking a user to type his phone number to an app he doesn't
yet know or trust, second I'll need to verify (authenticate) the
phone number, I mean what prevents that user from typing a phone
number that doesn't belong to him?
If I had access to the SMSs then I could dig up that code, but I find
it hard to believe that apps get access to SMSs, it's just sounds
like another reasonable sandbox restriction. Of course I'm not
speaking of jailbroken devices.
BTW, if the user just went over to the appstore to install my app (and didn't go through a conversation SMS) that's fine, in this case I'll just present a normal register/login page. The interesting case is where the user was already part of the conversation when receiving the SMS and now I want him to (effortlessly) become part of the same conversation through my app.
To sum up - is there a trick to present "personalized" pages the first time an app is installed and launched that would get that user right into the context of the conversation sent to him over SMS without having to request additional input?
Thanks!
It's impossible to do. Your application is installed without the knowledge you need whatsoever. As you pointed out, it's a reasonable sandboxing restriction.
What you could do is a challenge-response based system, but it would be about as intrusive to the user as is registering/login in.
Ran, you can keep a flag in NSUserDefaults (equivalent to Android's SharedPreferences)
http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Cocoa/Reference/Foundation/Classes/NSUserDefaults_Class/Reference/Reference.html