Dispatch
Notes from running other people's messages
What we have learned building and operating WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram messaging for businesses: the error codes, the limits with their real numbers, and the failures that only show up in production. Every article here has to contain something that cost somebody an afternoon to find out.
A schema for conversations that is still fast at ten million messages
The two access patterns that matter, why time-based partitioning wins, and the index that stops the inbox query from scanning everything.
Backoff that works: jitter, caps, and the retry storm
Exponential backoff without jitter synchronises your clients into a thundering herd. The four parameters that matter.
Storing a phone number so it still works in two years
E.164, one canonical column, and the four transformations that quietly destroy a number between a form and a database.
Business verification: the documents that actually pass
Meta checks that three things agree: your legal name, your address and your phone. The mismatches that cause most rejections.
Choosing the right webhook fields, and no more
Which fields carry messages, which carry noise, and the verification handshake that fails silently.
App Review for messaging permissions, without three rejections
What reviewers actually check, why screencasts fail, and the order to do things in so the review is the last step rather than the first.
Ice breakers and the persistent menu: the two settings people skip
Two Page settings that answer questions before anybody types. What to put in them and what to leave out.
Story replies and mentions: the messages that arrive with no context
A story reply is a DM about something that expires in 24 hours. What your inbox needs to show so the reply makes sense.
Comments are support tickets with an audience
Public questions, private replies, and the three comments you should never answer in public. How to run comments as a queue.
The Page token that dies when somebody leaves
Page access is granted to people, and tokens inherit that. What to use instead so messaging survives an employee leaving.
Message tags: the four doors out of the 24 hour window
What each tag permits, what using one wrongly costs, and why the human agent tag is the only one most businesses should care about.
Linked devices: what a session is, and why sending stops
Multi-device changed what a WhatsApp session is. What ends one, what does not, and what to check first when messages stop leaving.
Forms inside a chat: when a flow beats a conversation
Structured, multi-screen input inside WhatsApp. What it is good for, and the two cases where a person asking beats any form.
Click-to-WhatsApp ads, and the queue they create
The ad is the easy part. What arrives is a burst of conversations with 24 hour clocks, from people who know nothing about you yet.
Articles 57 to 70 of 98. New ones are announced on WhatsApp, or take the feed.