Support
Troubleshooting
Organized by symptom: what probably happened, and exactly where to look — from silent triggers to missing DMs.
“My flow didn’t fire”
Someone commented or messaged, and nothing happened. The likely causes, in the order they actually occur:
- The flow isn’t published — drafts never run from live events, and edits to a published flow don’t go live until you publish again. Check the status pill in the flow editor.
- The trigger is paused — pausing is easy to forget, and triggers pause automatically when their account disconnects. Check the trigger card at Automations → Triggers.
- The keyword didn’t match — matching ignores case, but Exact mode wants the whole word. “GUIDE!” matches Contains, not always what Exact expects.
- A frequency guard did its job — once per post per person is on by default; repeat commenters are skipped deliberately. The trigger card’s “skipped” counter counts these: matched, but didn’t run.
- The contact opted out — anyone who sent STOP is excluded from automation until they send START.
- The account has a connection problem — a warning status on the Accounts page pauses everything that depends on it.
“The flow ran, but the DM never arrived”
When a run starts but a message doesn’t land, the run itself tells you why. Open the flow’s Runs page and read the failure reason — the usual suspects:
- 24-hour window expired — Instagram only allows automated messages within 24 hours of the contact’s last message. The run ends gracefully; it isn’t an error in your flow.
- DM limit reached — Instagram caps automated DMs per hour, so during spikes messages queue and send when the limit resets. Delayed, not dropped; it only fails after repeated retries can’t get through.
- Contact opted out — a STOP arriving mid-conversation ends the run on the spot.
- Account disconnected — the connection dropped mid-run; fix the account, then re-run interest will return with the next trigger.
“My test code didn’t start the flow”
Live-test misfires are almost always one of five things:
- The session expired — test codes live for one hour. Start a fresh test.
- The draft wasn’t saved — the test runs the latest saved draft, not what’s on your screen. Save, then test.
- You DMed from the wrong side — the code must be sent to your connected account from a different account (your personal one), not from the connected account itself.
- The test account once sent STOP — opt-outs apply to testers too. Send START from that account first.
- It’s a raffle flow — raffles are tested from Automations → Raffles, not with a test code.
“My account shows a warning — or vanished”
Two different symptoms, one family of causes. An account showing a warning status on the Accounts page (usually an expired token) keeps its row and offers Reconnect — click it, log in, done. An account that disappeared from the list means Instagram revoked the access itself — a password change or removing the app from Instagram’s settings does it. Connect again with the same Instagram login and everything returns: contacts, conversations, flows.
Either way, triggers that paused during the outage stay paused until you reactivate them — check Automations → Triggers after any reconnect. And you often get warning shots before a break: token-renewal warnings appear in the Activity feed and the digest email days ahead.
Where to look, in order
When anything misbehaves, the same five surfaces answer nearly every question:
- 1The flow’s Runs page — every run with its status and failure reason; open a run for the step-by-step timeline.
- 2The trigger card — active or paused, run and skipped counters, and when it last ran.
- 3The Accounts page — connection status, with Reconnect where it’s needed.
- 4The Activity feed — the Issues tab collects failures, disconnects, rate limits, and opt-out skips; the All tab includes early warnings too.
- 5The activity digest email — a daily or weekly summary that flags account issues you might have missed in-app.
“The public comment reply was skipped”
Usually this is the honesty guard working as designed: when Ravela already knows it can’t deliver the DM — the commenter’s window is closed — it skips the public “check your DMs” reply rather than pointing at a message that won’t arrive. The DM rules drive the reply, not the other way around.
During big spikes there’s a second cause: Instagram caps public comment replies at roughly sixty an hour per account, and Ravela retries the excess as capacity frees up. The replies lag; the DMs keep flowing.