Inbox Delay

Control how long Stoked waits after a new conversation starts before it appears in your Activity Inbox.

What the Inbox Delay Does

When a prospect starts a conversation with an advocate, Stoked does not add the conversation to your Activity Inbox right away. Instead, it waits for a configurable number of hours before the conversation appears as an inbox entry.

During this delay period, the conversation is still active. The prospect and advocate can exchange messages normally. The only difference is that the conversation does not show up in the inbox for your admin team until the delay period has passed.

Why the Delay Exists

New prospects often need time to complete initial steps before a conversation is ready for admin attention:

• Phone number verification - Prospects may need to verify their phone number before they can fully engage.
• Continuing the conversation - A prospect might send an initial message and then follow up with more context shortly after.
• Reducing noise - Conversations that are abandoned quickly never clutter your inbox.

The delay gives prospects a window to complete these steps so that by the time the conversation reaches your inbox, it is more likely to be meaningful and actionable.

How to Configure the Delay

1. Navigate to Settings > Inbox in the Community Admin dashboard.
2. Locate the Conversation Inbox Entry Delay card.
3. Enter the number of hours in the Delay (hours) field.
4. Click Save Settings.

The delay value must be a whole number of hours and cannot be negative.

Default Value

The default delay is 2 hours. This means new conversations appear in your inbox two hours after the prospect sends their first message.

Immediate Inbox Entries

Set the delay to 0 if you want conversations to appear in the Activity Inbox as soon as they are created. This is useful if your team needs to respond to every new conversation right away.

How It Works

When a prospect starts a new conversation, Stoked schedules an inbox entry to be created after the configured delay. If the delay is set to 4 hours, the inbox entry is created 4 hours after the conversation starts. Changing the delay setting only affects new conversations going forward - it does not move existing inbox entries.

The delay applies only to the initial inbox entry for a new conversation. Subsequent activity in an existing conversation (new messages, introductions) follows the standard inbox update behavior.