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Hi all,
I wanted to share a Zapier solution that a customer of ours requested. I think it shows the tremendous power and flexibility of Zaps in helping with specific issues you might face. Especially for those issues that are too much of a niche or too org.specific to put on the wider inSided roadmap.

The question I received was as follows:

Can we automate responses when we get a question on the weekend? Since we cannot guarantee a response within 24 hours?
Something like “Thanks so much for your question! The Community team will get back to you when business hours resume on Monday 9am Pacific"

Let’s see what Zapier can do for us here!

Zapier

The business logic for this request will be something like For every question on inSided, check if it is on a weekend, if so, post an automated reply. Or in Zapier terms:

 

1. Trigger: New Topic in inSided

Fairly straightforward: we do something for every Question on our Community.

2. Format Date / Time

Here we use a native Zapier Formatter to take the timestamp from the trigger and extract the weekday (Mon, Tue, Wed..).

As input we get a timestamp from the trigger. 
We tell Zapier to extract weekday (ddd),
in the US/Pacific timezone.
And we tell Zapier that the original is in UTC (which is the standard timezone computers use).

3. Only continue on Weekend Days

The response should only happend on weekend days. Zapier provides a utility for that, called a Filter which will only continue with the rest of the Zap, if certain conditions are met.

In this case we tell Zapier to not continue, unless the extracted day is “Sat” or “Sun”. Meaning that on weekdays, the Zap will stop here and nothing happens. While this might make poor Zapier feel unproductive, it is exactly what we need.

If it is Saturday or Sunday, then we allow Zapier to move to the next step.

 

4. Create reply in inSided

The final step! We’ll reply to the user’s post with some helpful expectation management.

We’ll hardcode the User ID; in this case it’s a user with ID #7 named “Community Bot 🤖”, but it can also be your own account or that of the head of support.

We pick the topic ID to reply to and we need to tell Zapier that this is a Question Topic Type. We lift these straight from the Trigger.

In the reply content we put our friendly message… and presto!

 

Awesome post. Please share more like this if you come across them! 

I have a related Zap that I put together for automating some moderation reminders/calls to action. 

It’s a similar format, but a bit more complex because it is based on # of replies on the topic after 12 hours, so we used a webhook thinks to @matt enbar.

Then, I use the formatter zap to delay the reminder until 9am the next weekday. But I’m having trouble with that (it still fires on Saturdays). Any body have any advice? 

 

Awesome post. Please share more like this if you come across them! 

Oh you can be absolutely sure there’ll be more tips & tricks! I’m currently working on a way to more easily come up with extra ideas and potentially do some other magic tricks. That’s all I can say right now, other than the fact a few people have agreed to make it happen. Keep an eye out!

Awesome post. Please share more like this if you come across them! 

Will do!
Unfortunately, quite a few of the Zapier solutions I implement are either way to org. specific, or a bit too heavy on the temporary ducttape, string and glue 😅

 

Then, I use the formatter zap to delay the reminder until 9am the next weekday. But I’m having trouble with that (it still fires on Saturdays). Any body have any advice? 

Happy to help out, but I’d have to see your Zap :) You have my email, let’s set up a screenshare!

@ChrisPantelis here is another example of using Zaps.

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