Feeds & User Messaging

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Note

This feature is currently reserved for games that are selling in-app purchases. It will not function unless we have enabled it for your game. If you would like to have this feature enabled, please email us at [email protected].

User Messaging

The Kongregate API allows you to initiate a variety of messages to players to help increase engagement and social awareness of the game and a player's accomplishments within it. These fall within a few major categories: user-to-feed (self-posts and announcements), user-to-user (invites and gifting), and game-to-user (game updates, re-engagement). All of these messages will be subject to rate limiting, and the exact rates are still being tweaked by Kongregate based on game and user activity levels.

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While this functionality exists, the use of these messages by players is very different than Facebook and other social networks. Player communication happens primarily through chat and forums and in many cases they are playing on Kongregate specifically to get away from "Facebook games". Conservative use of these features is perfectly fine, but we recommend against repeatedly asking players to post, and expectations for virality from these should be limited.

User-to-Feed Messages

These types of posts enable users to put accomplishments on their own feed. You can initiate a feed posting with showFeedPostBox to allow user-to-self messages. The showShoutBox function will enable a self-post to the player's "Shouts", which is similar to Facebook's wall posts, and can be used for bragging about accomplishments. The primary difference between these functions is that a "shout" will appear as being posted by the player, while a "feed post" will be posted by the game and can have embedded images.

User-to-User Messages

To help raise awareness of your game, you can have players send an invite to other players for the game with showInvitationBox . The same function can be used for gifting or other click-to-action messages by simply including a URL link with whatever parameters are appropriate. Remember that to be passed into an iframe, parameters need to be prefixed with kv_, such as ?kv_foo=bar.

Game-to-User Messages

Your game can initiate a private message to the player with the client-side privateMessage method. Additionally, to let players know about updates, turn information, etc., you can initiate an offline private message server-side with the private_message server-side HTTP method.