Facebook Messenger to Gmail not pulling in names

If it's the latter, a screenshot of what you see would be useful.

Hi there,

Yes, I am having real issues with this one!

So this is what I am getting:

So basically the only thing coming through is the text of the message. I was told by someone else that users need to opt-in so their user info can be shared, they sent me this article: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/messenger-platform/identity/user-profile/#optin

But it clearly says users opt-in to sharing such information by "starting the conversation by sending a message."

So we should be able to see the name? Why would this be a Zapier feature if it does not work?

Just very confused...

Cheers

To add to the above, I do have an instant greeting on in the messenger settings. Will this somehow affect my Zap's ability to retrieve user info?

So @OWilde99

Firstly, what I'll do is flag this for someone at the Zapier Community team to look at. They might have some more insight on this or will flag it for support to check out if needed.

On a wider note, this might not be a Zapier issues, but rather a Facebook one. Given that "sender_full-name" exists means that Zapier can pull that value, but the other side of this is that Facebook needs to supply that.

My guess here is there is some sort of further privacy restriction, perhaps in your Facebook set up, or in the settings of individual users that's restricting this. Facebook change the goal posts with privacy rules all the time... it's not always possible for apps to keep up.

Let's hope Zapier HQ can shed some light here.

Hi @OWilde99, I've done some digging in our notes and it looks like there are some circumstances where we can't get the user information. @AndrewJDavison_Luhhu is right in that it depends on the permissions that we receive from Facebook.

In the Facebook developer notes it says that permission will be granted in the following circumstances:

• The person starts the conversation via a welcome screen and tapped the "Get Started" button.
• The person starts the conversation by clicking a "Send to Messenger" button.
• The person starts the conversation by sending a message.
• The person starts the conversation by accepting a Page's message request.
• Your Messenger bot uses the askPermission() function of the Messenger Extensions SDK in the webview to ask for the user_profile permission.

And some circumstances where permission wont be given are the following:

• Conversations started via the Checkbox Plugin and the user did has not responded on Messenger.
• Interactions started by opening a Chat Extension with no replies from the user on Messenger.
• Interactions with Ads that Click to Messenger before the user replies on Messenger

I hope that helps to clear up what might be happening here!

I've also passed this information onto the team that looks after help documentation so that it can be added to the Facebook Messenger help page.

Thanks @Danvers and @AndrewJDavison_Luhhu

Yes, it is very confusing! I have already read the documentation on FB with regards to opting in to share the user info. It does say that one of the ways a user can opt in is to "start the conversation by sending a message"

So I have no idea what is wrong! I can't seem to find any settings which would prohibit this from working and I have received messages from multiple people all with names missing....

Thanks for the help anyway. Hopefully the Zapier team can help with this.