So, we have decided to build a bot.

It started like all cool things. A friend of mine, Idoco, sent me this great article about how to easily build a Telegram bot, I have read it and loved the idea of bots so I added the Giphy bot to my Telegram and spammed my friends with awesome GIFs.

awesome GIF

I liked it and thought why not build one myself? It looks so simple. It really is, at least for Telegram bots.

The problem was that most of my friends don’t use Telegram and because I don’t need an app for talking to myself I should choose a different platform for my bot. The obvious answer was Facebook. And that’s when it started to get complicated.

It began with Facebook asking me to create a Facebook Page associated to my app, a bit weird but I could see the point. Idoco and I wrote together a very simple bot using Hook.io named Doge bot. Basically, when you write something to Doge it responses with the famous Doge meme image containing your words.

Doge Bot answer to “Facebook Bots cool”

We have tested it on Idoco’s phone but couldn’t on mine. We thought this is due to the fact that it wasn’t published yet. We decided to publish it. Retrospectively, trying to publish was the start of our Via Dolorosa journey.

Facebook demanded us to provide:

Screen-cast of the app.

Privacy policy document (hosted outside of Facebook!).

1024 x 1024 pixels App Icon.

A website (again, outside of Facebook) for the app.

Fill in a few paragraphs of bs, like: describe how you’re using the Send/Receive API, what are the main use-cases etc…

While a normal person would quit after these demands, we said to ourselves: “We have come so far that it will be a waste not to continue”. Idoco spent over an hour online finding some sort of a legal document and creating reasonable screen-casts, not to mention the web-page on git-hub. Finally we managed to publish it. Well, that wasn’t so bad, we thought. Maybe a bit annoying but we are past that.

A day later we got the following response:

Up to several weeks? Weeks? Seriously? Are we still in the Stone Age? Today, when a developer writes code it gets shipped to the user within the hour. Why does Facebook need weeks to handle my Doge?

A week later we saw something strange. Some Facebook user named Holly Golightly tried to use our bot.

Holly tries out Bot

We immediately thought our bot was approved by Facebook. A few minutes later we understood we were wrong after receiving the following feedback which pretty much concluded our bot experience:

“Please build a quality bot experience that is meaningful, stable and navigable.” “Your app contains inappropriate content and does not meet the Facebook community standards.”