Subscribe and communication with Viber Bot

Question

I followed the Viber Python Bot Tutorial to create a bot:

https://developers.viber.com/docs/api/python-bot-api/

I have deployed a local server using Ngrok, following this tutorial:

https://developers.viber.com/blog/2017/05/24/test-your-bots-locally

My problems:

1. When I try to call the set_webhook API method with the url provided by Ngrok, I get this error:

   Exception: failed with status: 999, message: DB Failure

   What can I do to fix that?

2. From what I understand I can use this bot to send messages to Viber users who have subscribed to this bot.

   How can a user subscribe to my bot? I can see the bot in my messages tab, but I can't subscribe or send a message to it.

Answer 1

First of all the "set_webhook" should be "linked" with a SSL, up and running server (using ngrok should be fine).

Now, in order a user to subscribe to a viber bot, the user needs to initialize a conversation. For example if the user writes the first message, he will see a notification that he has subscribed. (this is for GDPR and anti-spamming potential issues.)