A greeting, a question, a congratulation: listeners can send your studio a message. It is a note to a person, not an order to the machine. On the Berichten page (under Je publiek) you read them, deal with them and decide what happens to them.
How messages arrive
A listener sends a message through a form on your own site. You put that form there with a widget under Op je eigen site:
- Naar de studio — request and message in one form.
- Bericht naar de studio — a message only.
- Berichtenmuur (message wall) — shows the messages you have put on your site.
The note someone types with a request also ends up here. On the request itself that field stays empty; you see it here with "Bij een verzoekje" and a link to the requests. If a DJ has a show at that moment, it says "tijdens de show van …" (during the show of …).
How it fits in your plan
Messages belong to the same plan right as requests and polls. If it isn't in your plan, the page says so. What is already there you can still deal with.
Reading out on air (see below) also needs the voice right. Without it you don't see the Voorlezen button.
Accepting messages
At the top is a switch. If it's off, listeners are told nobody is reading right now.
Working through the pile
Under the switch you pick a filter: Nog te doen (still to do), Afgehandeld (dealt with), Voorgelezen (read out), Geweigerd (refused) or Alles (all). Each message has a status: Nieuw, Gezien, Afgehandeld, Geweigerd or Voorgelezen. Each message shows the name, the place if filled in, the time and the text.
Per message you have these buttons:
- Afgehandeld — you've done something with it, or don't need to.
- Voorlezen — your station's voice reads the message out. It comes after the record that is playing now; there is no exact time, because the queue waits for what is running. The screen asks for confirmation first. The button only appears if the sender agreed to being read out; otherwise there is a label Niet voorlezen (don't read out).
- Op de site / Van de site — puts the message on your site's message wall, or takes it off again.
- Weigeren — you have to write down briefly why ("swearing", "advertising", "not for broadcast"). If the listener calls later asking why their message wasn't there, you can explain. A refused message can't go on the site.
- The bin deletes the message for good, also from the wall on your site. That can't be undone.
Nothing is read out automatically
That's deliberate. There is always a person between a stranger's sentence and the transmitter, and that person presses the button. You can choose to put messages on the site straight away; then every incoming message appears on your wall without anyone looking at it — only your list of banned words sits in between. Reading out remains a button either way.
Settings
Open Instellingen for:
- Wachttijd per luisteraar (seconden) — how long a listener has to wait before they can send another message. That's much shorter than for requests: a conversation in which you may say one thing every half hour isn't a conversation. Leave it empty and the platform default applies (120 seconds).
- Naam en tekst wissen na (dagen) — how long messages are kept. The default is 30 days. A note with a request goes after the shorter of this period and the requests' one.
- Meteen op de site zetten — see above.
Webhook
Do you want a message in your own system, for example a chat channel or a screen in the studio? Then there's the webhook event Een luisteraar stuurt een bericht naar de studio (message.received). See Webhooks.
What you can't read from the screen
Deleting and automatic clean-up aren't the same. Deleting is something you do by hand, per message. Name and text are also removed automatically after the number of days you chose under Instellingen.
A message is not a request. A listener who wants to hear something requests a record; a message is for you and your presenter, and your station doesn't play anything because of it.