Congratulations on building out your bot!
Once you’re ready to launch your bot, head to the Launch tab in the left hand panel of the dashboard. The Launch tab is where you can:
- Launch your bot
- Generate a shareable link to your live bot
- Generate a code to embed your bot on a website
- Update a live bot
- Unpublish a bot
Launch your bot
The process to launch your bot is different depending on if you’re a builder, manager or admin on Josef.
Manager or admins
To launch your bot, simply click the ‘Launch’ button. This will do a few things:
Josef will generate a link for a ‘live’ version of your bot. You can copy this link and share it directly with others to use your bot!
- The live version of your bot will record data from all user interactions. You can access that data in the Activity tab. Administrators on Josef can also see high level information about all live bots in the Reporting tab.
- The live version of your bot will also send notifications, if you have them set up.
Builders
As a builder, you will need to submit your bot for approval. Learn more at Submit your bot for approval.
Embed your bot on a website
Josef will generate an embed code for your live bot in the Launch tab.
If you want to embed your bot on a website you can use the embed code to do so.
This code will create an iframe (a window on the webpage) in which your bot will appear. Your website manager can use the embed code to manipulate the size and shape of the iframe.
Update a live bot
If you ever need to update a live bot, the first rule is: be careful! You’re dealing with live data and you’re making changes to something that your end users can see.
We recommend doing this in two ways.
For small updates, like editing the message text or basic changes to rules, you can make these edits directly in your live bot via the dashboard. You can test these in Preview and, when you’re ready, click ‘Update’ in the Launch tab to ensure that all changes flow through to the live bot.
For any significant updates which involve deleting messages or connections or adding new branches, we suggest making a copy of the bot by clicking ‘Duplicate’ in the Details tab. Once you’ve made the changes and you’re happy that they’re working as expected, you can either:
- launch the new version of the bot and replace the URL with the new URL; or
- make the changes to the existing live version of the bot and click ‘Update’ in the Launch tab to ensure that all changes flow through to the live bot.
Unpublish a bot
You can unpublish a live bot to prevent users from accessing it temporarily or permanently. You may want to do this if you want to make some changes to your bot or if the advice it is giving is out of date.
Unpublishing your bot means users who access the live link will be taken to an inactive page informing the user that the bot has been unpublished by the owner (see example below).
If the bot is launched again, it will use the same URL as before, meaning anyone accessing it at a link or embedded on a webpage will be able to access it again.
Note: only managers and admins on Josef can unpublish bots. Admins can also unpublish bots from the Manage bots tab.
