Thanks to you, our customers, 2017 was a record breaking year for Semaphore and 2018 is shaping up to be even bigger! As you might recall, we successfully launched our new and improved platform early last year.
As a result of our growth, late last year we experienced a few growing pains involving messages being delayed by minutes and sometimes even hours. To start off the year we’ve been working hard to make the platform as fast and reliable as possible. To achieve those goals we’ve made a few key changes to the way messages are handled as follows:
Single Messages
Single messages are now processed before bulk messages, meaning that if you send a message to one recipient, that message is prioritized over a message being sent to multiple recipients in a single API request. This should solve the issue where bulk marketing messages end up clogging the queues and delaying messages.
Priority Messages
We’ve also implemented priority messages and corresponding API endpoint which allows your message to skip to the front of the line on both the “bulk” and “single” message queues. To prevent abuse, this “priority messages” cost 2 credits (instead of 1 credit) per 160 character message.
To use this method just change the API endpoint from /api/v4/messages to /api/v4/priority. Priority messages have a guaranteed SLA of 10 minutes. The priority endpoint is not rate limited. This is good for time sensitive messages like one-time passwords or two factor authentication.
API Connection Limits
Starting April 1, 2018 all non-priority API requests will be limited to 30 requests per minute. If your system is sending the same message to multiple numbers, please make a single request to /api/v4/messages and specify multiple numbers (comma separated) in the ‘recipient’ field.
These features are currently in beta so let us know if you have any problems–we appreciate your feedback! Our documentation has been updated and can be found at https://semaphore.co/docs. Thanks again for helping us to be the best way to send SMS in the Philippines and please do let us know if there’s anything else we can do to help either through the chat widget on our websites, by emailing support@semaphore.co or through our Facebook page.
As always, thanks for choosing Semaphore!
Your Semaphore Team
