How the channel changes what respondents see

The same eflow can reach people more than one way, and not every option is honored on all of them. This is the most common reason a setting looks broken: it was saved correctly, and the channel it was saved for is not the channel being looked at.

The channels the settings know about

Each option below has a Show on row of checkboxes, and the names in it are these:

You do not choose one in a setting. You choose it by how you publish, and Acquainto works out which channel is in use at the moment the conversation renders. The Share button on an eflow gives you three anonymous ways to publish, and the eflow’s Personalized links page gives you a fourth:

Three of them are Hosted, and that is not a quirk: the rules below are about whether the conversation is the page, and on the inline embed it is. The difference between the link and the inline embed is whose page it is, which is not something any of these settings turn on. A personalized link is the plain link plus a name — it changes who the answer is attributed to, not how the conversation is drawn, so every rule below treats it exactly as Hosted.

What each channel honors

The Never rows are not preferences, and no checkbox turns them on. The top row is the mirror image: the data notice — the line naming you and linking to how answers are handled — has no checkbox either, and is the one thing every channel carries identically. It steps aside only for the start card, which says the same thing at more length.

• The start card is skipped in the chat box because a person has already clicked to open it. There is nothing for a Start button to gate.
• The CTA button is unavailable in an iframe because the embed sandbox blocks outbound links. The checkbox is not offered, and the widget refuses it a second time even if the setting somehow arrives set.
• The redirect is unavailable in an iframe and in the chat box because navigating there moves the embed, not the page. It would blank the screen the respondent is reading while your page sat untouched behind it.

The opening statement row is the one genuinely-off-by-default case: the Chat box checkbox exists and is simply unticked. A launcher sits on a page of yours that usually already explains the ask, so a statement there costs a screenful before the first question. Tick it if your launcher is on a bare landing page.

The trap: a channel list that excludes the channel you are looking at

Untick a channel under Show on and that text does not render there. The eflow still saves, nothing warns you, and the text is simply absent.

So a closing statement with Chat box unticked does not appear in the chat box. Nothing in the conversation explains the gap — there is no “hidden” marker, because from the respondent’s side nothing is missing. If you have written something and cannot find it, check Show on before anything else.

Checking it before you publish

Preview in the eflow editor opens the real respondent conversation, at the real width of the channel you pick in it — a 640-pixel hosted page, a 480-pixel iframe, a 382-pixel chat box. It is the same screen your respondents get, not a drawing of it, so the table above is something you can check rather than take on trust: switch the channel in the preview and the opening card, the closing card and the CTA button appear or disappear exactly as they will on the day.

It runs on your branding too — your mark, your color, your typeface, your privacy link, and whether the “Powered by Acquainto” line is there.

Nothing in a preview is recorded. No response is saved, nobody is notified, no webhook fires, and your completion rate does not move.

Defaults, if you never touch Show on

• Opening statement: Hosted, Iframe
• Closing statement: Hosted, Iframe, Chat box
• Closing CTA: Hosted, Chat box