Opt-Out Commands

Among the commands available to contacts to manage their conversation with your chatbot are those that allow them to opt-out of the service. These are extremely important and generally explained to contacts starting with the introductory message.

Mainstay is proud to comply with opt-out regulations and exceeds industry standards. This is achieved through the ability for contacts to use universal opt-out commands as well as Mainstay’s proprietary commands. Opt-out commands unique to Mainstay can be identified by using a # at the beginning of the word, unlike universal commands.

What is #PAUSE?

#PAUSE is an Mainstay-designed command that allows students to stop messages from your bot temporarily or permanently. Because this command is controlled by Mainstay, you can choose to re-engage the contact at a later time if something in their status changes.

Having the ability to manipulate the unsubscribe command becomes helpful in certain cases. For example, a contact might unsubscribe when they are not coming to the school this academic term, but you want to message them when they apply again to a future academic term. Unsubscribing them in our system rather than with the texting provider, allows you to change their permissions and message them when they apply again.

The #PAUSE command also allows students to select how long they want to unsubscribe for. Sometimes, contacts simply want to pause messages for a certain period of time, so when they type #PAUSE, the bot will give them the option to unsubscribe from messages forever or for only two weeks.  

Contacts who are in a #pause state are referred to as "soft stops" in our data tracking. You may see this language in your data reports or the analytics page of the dashboard.

Pause Forever: 

Pause Temporarily:

#Pause, #Stop, #stopall, #unsubscribe, #cancel, #end, and #quit are Mainstay unique commands that allow the contact to stop the conversation on demand. These synonyms give contacts the additional option to stop all messages from the system for a predetermined period of time or until the contact texts a command to re-engage. If a contact stops the conversation using one of these commands, the Mainstay system stops any message from being sent to that contact in the first place. In addition, this status will be visible in the contact data.

What is STOP?

When your chatbot receives the word STOP (or a synonym like CANCEL, UNSUBSCRIBE, END or QUIT), our texting provider will blacklist the number of the recipient and prevent your chatbot from further communicating with it. The only way to reengage with this number again is if the recipient chooses to text in the word START (or a synonym like YES or UNSTOP).

Mainstay refers to these opted out users as "hard stops" in our data tracking. You may see this language in data reports or your analytics page of the dashboard.

Because this command is controlled by our text messaging provider, Mainstaydoes not control the copy of the messages that are sent back to the recipient. 

Stop, stopall, unsubscribe, cancel, end, and quit are universal commands (applicable to all text messaging services across the industry) that stop messages from being sent to the contact by a texting provider. The texting provider is the platform that transports the messages to the contact once they’ve been sent from our system. Messages from the system are stopped until the contact texts a code to re-engage.