Scheduled Comments | FastComments Docs

Background

Scheduled Comments is a FastComments feature to play back comments over a period of time, making it appear as though real users are leaving comments. For example, you could have one comment posted after a few seconds, and then a few seconds later another comment as a reply, and so on. Every comment can have its own username, avatar, as desired.

This can be useful for webinars or other events where it may be desirable to kick off conversations in an automated way.

Howto

Using FastComments Scheduled Comments is simple. First, you'll want to import the comments here.

This page can also be accessed via Manage Data->Schedule Comments.

Manually Played Comments

For manually played comments (you have to manually hit Play), you have the option to start playing back comments. This will play back the comments on each page you've defined in the CSV file, with the delays between each comment based on the delay you specified.

This is useful when you have a scheduled live webinar that starts at a specific time. When the webinar starts, just hit Play in the dashboard.

Automatically Playing Comments

For automatically playing comments, the comments are played back on each page load for each user.

This is useful for scenarios where videos or other content starts from the beginning with each pay load.

Dynamically Growing Playback

Each time the autoplay script is ran for a user - on page load - there is still the opportunity for others to comment.

As people leave comments, their comments, the comments are automatically added to the replay script at the same offset from page load, so the conversation continues to grow without any manual work.

You can additionally moderate the comments posted, to curate which comments you want to show each time the autoplay script is ran.

The Moderate Comments page will also show a timestamp like AutoPlay 1hr 2m 30s next to each comment instead of the date.

This is only available for automatic playback, not manually scheduled playback.

Configuration

Every comment will be posted live. You may want to consider turning on showing live comments right away.

You can learn about the import format in the Import Format section of this documentation.

Import Format

Format Example

The Scheduled Comments CSV looks like this:

ID	Parent ID	URL ID	Name	Comment	Hours	Minutes	Seconds
1		scheduledtest	Test Person 1	Hello!	0	0	3
2	1	scheduledtest	Test Person 2	How are you?	0	0	10
3	2	scheduledtest	Test Person 3	Leave them alone	0	1	30
4		scheduledtest	Test Person 4	Does anyone have a cute cat to share?	1	10	0

Format Details

The Scheduled Comments CSV file supports the following columns:

ID
Parent ID
URL ID
URL
Name
Avatar
Comment
Hours
Minutes
Seconds

The following columns are required:

ID
URL ID
Name
Comment
Hours
Minutes
Seconds

You'll need the Parent ID column if you want to support automated nested replies.

How The Format Works

The import format works like this:

You define a row in the CSV for every comment you want posted.
The comment is posted after the delay specified (hours + minutes + seconds).
1. For Manually Scheduled imports, delays are relative to when you hit "play" in the UI, after the import is done - not when the import starts.
2. For Auto Schedules imports, the delay is from the time of page load.
You must define an ID. You can just use incrementing identifiers like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
If you want to use nested replies, you just set the Parent ID column value to the ID of another comment.
The Comment field supports the same syntax as FastComments supports in its comment widget for styling text and adding images.
The Avatar field, if used, must be a publicly accessible image. It will be copied to and served from our CDN.
You can delete all the comments after the replay, or if the replay is stopped.
Deletion happens live, so you can reuse the same scheduled import over and over.

An Example

An example CSV file is here.