Comments land in the shared inbox - and a fix for replies that were never actually sent

Two changes to social conversations, one of which is a fix worth being direct about. The fix first. Replying to an Instagram, Facebook or WhatsApp conversation from the shared inbox wrote your reply into the thread but did not send it to the platform - you saw your message, the customer never received it. That is now fixed: a reply is delivered first, and only recorded once it has actually gone. If it can't be delivered you get a plain explanation instead of a message that looks sent - most often "this platform only allows a free-form reply within 24 hours of the customer's last message, and that window has closed", which is Meta's rule rather than ours. If you have replied to social conversations from the inbox before today, it is worth checking whether those customers ever heard back. Second, comments now become real conversations. Until now a comment was either handled by an automation or it disappeared - a question nobody had written a keyword for went unanswered. Comments now arrive in the shared inbox like any other message, which means they inherit everything the inbox already does: labels, assignment, snoozing, internal notes, @mentions, bulk actions, the waiting timer and SLA reporting. Each comment thread is its own conversation, so replying is unambiguous, and replying from the inbox posts publicly on the comment. Because a busy account can collect hundreds of "🔥🔥" comments a day, the default is deliberately not everything: you get the comments that need a person - ones no rule answered, ones a rule explicitly escalated, and anything that reads as negative, even when an automation already replied to it. An automation answering an unhappy customer should not be the end of the story. You can widen this to every comment, or switch it off, per account. Comments you have moderated are never routed - hiding something and then putting it in your inbox would defeat the point, and the moderation log already records what happened and why. Finally, the inbox rail gained a Channels section, so you can jump straight to Email, Website chat, Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp or X.