Write starter questions once, show them everywhere

Starter questions used to be buried inside an agent configuration version: up to three per language, retyped for every version, and visible on one surface only. They now live in one place per site, under Engagement → Questions, and every surface that has them switched on reads the same library.

Each question carries the Question itself per language (up to 60 characters), optionally a different message to send when it's tapped (up to 500), a page scope (All pages, or a pick of Home / Category / Product / Checkout), a Live switch, and a position in the library that decides which questions win a slot.

Three surfaces show them. The chat welcome screen, on the hosted link, the embedded panel and the Playground, controlled by Show starter questions on the agent version, which is on by default, including on the versions you already have live. And the question bar and chat bubble on your storefront, each controlled by its own Show starter questions switch on the widget's Content tab, off by default and versioned like the rest of a widget, so it reaches shoppers when you publish.

Editing a question applies at once, everywhere, on your live champion included. There's no draft and no publish for the content itself; only the on/off switches are versioned. Fixing a typo in a shopper-facing question no longer waits for a release.

What decides which three showCopy Anchor Link

Every surface shows at most three chips, taken in library order, and the selection is the same for all of them: a question bar and a chat bubble on the same page show the same three. Two rules are worth knowing before you write twenty questions:

• A question with no text in the shopper's language is skipped, not translated and not substituted. There is no fallback to your site's default language (unlike a chat bubble's own label, which does fall back). It doesn't consume a slot either. The library flags such a question as Partial and names the languages it does show in. Worth watching, because nothing on the storefront will tell you.
• A question's page scope and a widget's page targeting must both admit the page. On a storefront, chips render only where your tag declares a page type with iadvize('set', { customData: { pageType } }). Declare nothing and the widget still shows, but its chips don't.

When more than three questions can reach the same page type, the library says so and names the page type, so you can reorder rather than wonder.

Where it shows up in the dashboardCopy Anchor Link

The library is a grid: search across questions and messages in every language, filters for language, page type and status (Live, Partial, Needs setup, Offline), a Live switch per row, and row actions for Edit, Duplicate, Move up / Move down and Delete. Deleting asks first, and removes the question from every surface at once.

Writing one happens on its own page: New question beside the page title, Edit in a row's menu. Move up and Move down are only offered on the unfiltered grid, because a move swaps the question with its neighbour in the whole library rather than in the rows you've narrowed down to.

A new permission pair, Starter questions: View and Starter questions: Edit, gates it. Both built-in roles, Admin and Member, hold both; a role holding neither doesn't see Questions in the sidebar at all. With View alone you can open a question's page and read it, without a Save button.

The widget preview draws the chips too: the actual ones your storefront would serve for the simulated page type and the previewed language.

If you cleared the web tag against a published size budget, note that rendering chips on the storefront added 575 B gzip to the assistant bundle, and the published ceiling moved from 7 KB to 7.5 KB gzip. The tag now measures 7 235 B against it. Nothing else about the tag's footprint changed: same requests before a shopper interacts, same zero layout shift, same pinned page-wide listener set. See Web tag performance. Two CSS custom properties (--iadvize-starter-bg, --iadvize-starter-fg) and two shadow parts (starter-questions, starter-question) join the published styling contract.

Removing a language from a site now also deletes that language's starter-question text, behind the confirmation you already get for welcome messages, display names and indicator messages. A question left with no text in any language isn't deleted: it keeps its page scope and its place in the library, and is reported as Needs setup.