A bulk action is one instruction applied to many contacts. Lynomia Chat offers three: add labels, remove labels, and delete. They all work the same way, and the interesting part is not the buttons — it is what "many" is allowed to mean.
Two kinds of selection
The contacts list shows fifteen rows at a time, so there are two different things you might mean by "all of them".
| What it selects | How you get it | |
|---|---|---|
| Rows | the contacts you ticked | tick them, or Select all (15) for the page |
| The whole view | every contact the current view matches, however many pages that is | tick everything on the page, then Select all N in this view |
The second option only appears once the page itself is exhausted and the view has more rows beyond it, because until then the two mean the same thing. Once it is on, the bar stops counting rows and reads All N selected. Touching any individual checkbox turns it back off — a hand-made change to the selection is no longer "everything this view matches".
A row selection survives paging, so you can also build one up across several pages by hand.
The views you can act on as a whole
Whichever view you are in is the view that gets acted on:
- the contacts list, on its own or narrowed to one label
- a search
- the Active contacts list
- a filter you have applied, or a saved shared audience
The resolution happens on the server, from the same description the list was built from, so the contacts acted on are the contacts the list was showing. This is also why a whole-view action is not available until you have scrolled to the bottom of the page: only the server can enumerate the rows your browser does not have.
On a search, Lynomia Chat sometimes cannot say how many results there are without a slow count, and in that case the button reads Select all results in this view with no number. It still acts on all of them. A missing number is honest, not a failure.
When to bulk-act, and when to do something else
A bulk action is the right tool only when you want a one-off, permanent change to the contacts themselves. Three near neighbours do something different, and reaching for the wrong one is the usual mistake:
| What you actually want | Use | Why not a bulk action |
|---|---|---|
| A group that keeps itself up to date | a shared audience | a label applied today does not notice tomorrow's new customers |
| To get contacts into the account in the first place | import contacts | bulk actions only change contacts that already exist |
| To message this group | a campaign | labelling people does not send anything |
| To mark one conversation, not the person | a conversation label | a contact label follows the customer across every conversation they ever have |
Do not use a bulk action when the set is a question, not a list. "Customers who bought in the last 60 days" changes every day. Labelling them freezes an answer that was only true at the moment you pressed the button. Save it as a shared audience instead, and the answer stays current.
Do use one when the set really is a list. "These 240 contacts came from the trade show" is a fact that does not change, and a label is exactly how you record it — including because a label is the only way to reach a hand-picked set from a campaign at all. A shared audience stores a query, not a set of people, so there is no way to express "these specific contacts" in one.
What you can do
| Action | Who | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Assign Labels | any agent | Additive. Existing labels on the contact are kept. The label must already exist in the account. |
| Remove Labels | any agent | Subtractive. Labels the contact does not carry are ignored. |
| Delete | administrator | Permanent, and takes the contacts' conversations with them. |
The Remove menu lists every label in the account rather than only the ones your selection carries, so you may see labels that do nothing when removed. That is harmless.
Steps
- Open the contacts list and get to the set you want: search, apply a filter, or open a label or audience.
- Tick the rows, or tick the page and then Select all N in this view.
- Choose an action in the bar that appears.
- Wait. The action is queued and the list refreshes once it has actually run, so the rows you see afterwards are the result and not a stale copy.
A worked example
You want every customer in Hawalli who has bought from you to carry the label hawalli, so you can message
them when a branch opens there.
- In the contacts list, apply a filter: city is Hawalli.
- Tick the checkbox at the top of the page. The bar says 15 selected.
- Select all 412 in this view. The bar now says All 412 selected.
- Assign Labels → hawalli.
- Open Contacts → Tagged with → hawalli to confirm, and use it as a campaign's recipients from there.
Note what step 4 did: it put the label on the contacts, which is what a campaign reads. Labelling conversations would not have worked — see labels.
Limits
- 10,000 contacts per action. A view matching more than that is refused outright and nothing is queued. An action that silently did a quarter of the job would be worse than one that did nothing. Narrow the view, or work through it page by page.
- Only labels and deletion. There is no bulk edit of names, phone numbers, custom attributes or the blocked flag, and no bulk "add to an audience". To change field values in bulk, export the contacts, edit the file and import it back.
- No partial-failure report. If one contact in a selection cannot be saved, it is skipped quietly. The action reports success for the batch.
- Bulk actions are not recorded in the audit log, and neither is any other change to a contact.
- Deletion cannot be undone, and unlike deleting a single contact it does not stop for a contact who is currently online.
- Export is a separate action in the page header, not part of this bar. It exports the view you are looking at, is administrator-only, and arrives by email.
Related
If it does not work
"Select all N in this view" is not offered. Either every row of the view is already on the page — in which case the page selection is the whole view — or you have not selected the whole page yet. It appears only once every visible row is ticked.
The message says the view has too many contacts. It matches more than 10,000. Add a condition to the filter and try again; nothing was changed.
The labels menu will not accept a label. Labels have to exist in the account before they can be assigned. Create it in Settings first.
Delete is missing from the bar. You are signed in as an agent. Deleting contacts is an administrator action.
I removed a label and the contacts still show it. Check which label. Contact labels and conversation labels are stored separately, and this bar only touches contact labels.