Why the panel opens on wording you did not write

The panel opens with a greeting, an input placeholder or a name that is not what the Appearance tab says it should be.

In rough order of how often each one turns out to be the answer. Work down rather than across: each carries a way to tell whether it is yours before you change anything.

• 1

  The configuration is up to a minute behind

  Why

  The request that carries the greeting fires on every page view whether or not anybody opens the widget, so it is cached hard for a minute at our end and the response tells the browser it may do the same. A saved change is live, and the page in front of you may still be reading the previous copy.

  How to confirm it is this one

  Wait a minute and hard refresh. If the new wording appears, this was it. Nothing else is worth trying before that minute is up, because every other cause here survives a refresh.

  Fix

  Nothing to fix. Worth knowing that the same minute applies to the name, the colours, the position and whether the assistant is active, and does not apply to answers at all.

• 2

  The panel is given its configuration once, when the page loads

  Why

  The loader fetches the configuration during page load and holds it. The panel gets a copy the first time it reports itself ready, and never asks again for the life of that page. Closing the panel and opening it again reuses what is already there.

  How to confirm it is this one

  Close and reopen the panel: the old wording is still there. Reload the page: the new wording appears, assuming the minute above has passed. Those two outcomes together are this cause.

  Fix

  Reload the page rather than the widget when you are checking a change. This is also why a visitor who has had a tab open all afternoon is reading the greeting you had this morning.

• 3

  You are editing a different assistant

  Why

  The greeting belongs to the assistant whose key is in the tag on the page, and a workspace with more than one assistant has more than one greeting. Nothing on either screen says which one a given site is using.

  How to confirm it is this one

  View source on the live page and read the data-key off the tag. Compare it against the key on the Install tab of the assistant whose Appearance tab you have been editing. Same site is not the same thing as same key.

  Fix

  Edit the assistant that owns that key, or change the key on the site. If it turns out you have two assistants where you meant to have one, deleting the spare is cleaner than keeping both in step.

• 4

  Suggested questions have no field on the Appearance tab

  Why

  The panel can show up to four suggested questions under the greeting, before the first message is sent, and they disappear for the rest of that conversation as soon as anybody types. They live in the same configuration as the greeting, and the Appearance tab has no box for them: it holds the brand name, the greeting, the input placeholder and a logo address.

  How to confirm it is this one

  Open the Appearance tab and read the Identity card. Four fields, none of them suggestions. If you were expecting to edit them there, that expectation is the whole problem.

  Fix

  They can be set on the assistant through the API, which writes the same configuration the tab does. Until they are set, the panel opens on the greeting alone, which is a perfectly reasonable place to be.

• 5

  The greeting is being read as formatting

  Why

  The greeting goes through the same small renderer as an answer, so asterisks, underscores, backticks, square brackets around a number and anything shaped like a link are treated as instructions about how to draw the text rather than as characters to show.

  How to confirm it is this one

  Compare the box against what is drawn. A phrase wrapped in single asterisks arrives in italics, a pair of asterisks arrives bold, and a bracketed number arrives as a small raised marker of the sort that appears under answers.

  Fix

  Reword without those characters, or use them deliberately. Bold on the first line of a greeting reads well in a narrow panel, which is the pleasant version of this problem.

Some of the wording in the panel has no setting anywhere and never has. The status line under the name, the label on the close control, the question asking whether an answer was helpful, and every label and button on the form that collects a visitor's details are built into the panel. If what you want to change is one of those, no amount of looking at the Appearance tab will find it, and knowing that is worth more than another five minutes of looking.

Does the greeting count as a message against my plan?

No. It is drawn by the panel from the configuration and is never sent anywhere, so nothing is asked, nothing is stored and nothing is billed. A conversation showing only the greeting is a session nobody typed into.

Can the greeting change from page to page?

No. One assistant has one greeting, and every page carrying that key gets it. A different greeting means a different assistant, with its own material and its own key.

I saved and the preview beside the form changed. Is it live?

The preview beside the form is drawn from what you have typed, so it moves as you type and before you save. What a visitor sees is the saved configuration, up to a minute later, on their next page load.