Conversation Beats
Conversation beats are small grey timeline markers that appear between messages in a conversation. They surface meaningful system events — things that happened but weren’t said by anyone — so it’s clear what’s a person speaking versus what the platform is recording.
What a Beat Looks Like
A beat is a thin horizontal divider with short uppercase text in the middle, set apart from real chat bubbles by colour and weight:
━━━━━━━ RICKY BLOCKED THIS PROSPECT · 2 MINUTES AGO ━━━━━━━
Each beat shows a relative timestamp (“2 minutes ago”). Hover the beat to see the exact time.
Beats sit inline with messages, in the same chronological position as the event that produced them.
Beat Types
The following events render as beats today:
- Waiver Signed — a prospect signed your community’s waiver. Shows the signer’s name and the waiver title.
- Prospect Blocked / Unblocked by Advocate — the advocate on the conversation restricted (or restored) the prospect’s ability to message.
- Prospect Blocked / Unblocked by Admin — a community admin restricted (or restored) the prospect from the backend.
- Prospect SMS Opted Out — the prospect texted STOP (or another opt-out keyword). See Prospect STOP handling for the full list of keywords that trigger this.
- Prospect SMS Opted In — the prospect re-enabled SMS after a prior opt-out (e.g., by texting START).
- Offer Viewed — the prospect opened a shared offer page from a link in this conversation.
- Offer Clicked — the prospect clicked the Shop button on a shared offer page.
Who Sees Which Beats
Beats pick their audience based on who needs to know. The same conversation may show different markers to an admin reviewing it than to the advocate or prospect involved.
| Beat | Admin | Advocate | Prospect |
|---|---|---|---|
| Waiver Signed | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Prospect Blocked by Advocate | ✓ | ✓ | — |
| Prospect Unblocked by Advocate | ✓ | ✓ | — |
| Prospect Blocked by Admin | ✓ | — | — |
| Prospect Unblocked by Admin | ✓ | — | — |
| Prospect SMS Opted Out | ✓ | — | — |
| Prospect SMS Opted In | ✓ | — | — |
| Offer Viewed | ✓ | ✓ | — |
| Offer Clicked | ✓ | ✓ | — |
A dash (—) means the beat is suppressed in that audience’s view of the conversation. For example, when an admin blocks a prospect from the backend, neither the advocate nor the prospect sees a marker — only other admins reviewing the same conversation do.
Beats vs. Messages
Before beats, some of these events were logged as fake “admin” messages in the conversation timeline — they looked like real chat bubbles from a system actor. That made it hard to tell at a glance what was a person speaking versus what was the platform recording an event.
Going forward, only real chat messages render as chat bubbles. System events render as beats.
Existing waiver-signed entries that landed before this change remain as messages on the timeline. Only new signings render as beats. The same is true for any pre-existing block/unblock entries — those were already messages and stay that way.
Related: Searching Conversations · Offers