Phone numbers and contact details: the Facebook comment reply template
Competitors dropping their number under your posts, and customers pasting their own, are the same problem with different intent. Neither is solved with a reply rule — it is channel moderation, which runs before any rule and stops the comment there.
Protective, not commercial. The seller wants the comment gone quickly and quietly, and wants to know what the filters will and will not catch before trusting them.
Checked against the product on
When this fires
Paste these into the rule’s keyword list. Any one of them matching is enough — keywords are an OR list, not an AND list.
viber metext meadd memessage me heremy number iswhatsapp meline idcheck my pagecheaper heresame item
How Mentbot reads them
- Matching is a plain substring test, not a whole-word test. A keyword matches anywhere inside the comment — which is why the list below matters.
- Case is ignored, and text is NFKC-folded first, so ＳＡＬＥ matches sale and full-width or styled characters still match.
- Thai, emoji and any other script work the same way: the comment is compared as text, with no language detection.
- Leading and trailing spaces in a keyword are trimmed, and a blank keyword row never matches anything.
The public reply
Add these as separate reply variants on the rule. Mentbot picks one at random each time a comment matches, so the same post does not fill up with one identical sentence.
- Variant 1
Thanks for your interest! Everything official comes from this Page only — prices and orders in your inbox 💬
For the optional companion reply rule, which answers and then hides. Moderation alone is silent, and a comment it hides never reaches any rule — so this rule only answers phrasings in its own keyword list that moderation let through.
- Variant 2
We only sell through this Page and our Messenger 🔒 We've sent you the real prices.
{comment} is replaced with the commenter’s own text. It is the only token Mentbot substitutes — there is no {name} or {page}.
The Messenger DM
The private reply Mentbot sends to the same commenter. On Facebook this is a Messenger private reply to the comment, so it only works while Facebook’s reply window for that comment is open.
Hi! Just so you know: we only take orders through this Page and this Messenger thread. Anyone messaging you separately offering the same items cheaper is not us. Here's the current price list and how to order safely.
Settings to turn on
The four switches on the rule, and what this scenario needs from each.
| Setting | This template | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Reply once | On | Answers each commenter once per post for this rule — and an attempt Facebook refused still counts as that once. The same person commenting again on the same post gets nothing more from this rule, but a different rule can still answer them, and the same rule answers them again on a different post. |
| Mention the commenter | Off Off. Never @mention someone you are moderating. | Puts an @mention of the commenter at the front of the public reply. It applies to the public reply only, never to the Messenger message. |
| Hide the comment | On On for the companion rule. It only ever sees comments moderation let through — anything the filters or blacklist caught stops there — so its hide is a backstop for phrasings the filters miss. Keep its keywords out of the blacklist, or it never fires. | Hides the comment once this rule has answered it. The author and their friends still see it; everyone else does not. Separate from your Page’s moderation filters, which run earlier. |
| Like the comment | Off | Likes the comment from the Page, straight after the public reply goes out. |
Scope
Where the rule is allowed to fire.
The rule runs on every post but only on comments containing one of its keywords.
The companion rule is keyword-scoped on purpose: with no keywords and hide switched on, it would be a catch-all that hides every comment no other rule answered. Moderation itself is a channel-level setting, not a rule: it applies to every comment on every post of that Page, and there is no way to scope it to some posts. The six filters — links, emails, phone numbers, images, mentions and emoji-only — are switches you turn on, with one shared action of hide or delete.
When two rules could both answer
Exactly one rule answers a comment. Mentbot ranks every rule that qualifies and runs the most specific one; the rest are recorded as outranked, not run.
- A rule limited to a list of posts wins first — even if it also has keywords.
- Then a rule with a hashtag or keywords.
- Then the catch-all with neither.
- If two rules tie on that rank, the older one wins. There is no priority field to set.
What will not match
Comments a seller expects this rule to catch, and does not. Each one follows from the matching rules above.
| The comment | Why it does not fire |
|---|---|
| A number written with dots, like 09.12.345.678 | The phone detector deliberately excludes dots, so that version numbers and IP addresses in ordinary comments are not treated as phone numbers. The trade-off is that dotted phone numbers get through. |
| A short number — fewer than nine digits in a row | The phone filter looks for a run of nine or more digits, allowing spaces, dashes and brackets between them. "Call 555 1234" is under the threshold and passes. |
| A bare domain on an unusual TLD, like myshop.ph | The link filter matches anything starting http:// or www., plus bare domains on a fixed list of common endings — com, net, org, io, co, me, ly, app, dev, shop, xyz, info, biz, online, store, site, club, live, tv, cc and th. The list is deliberately narrow so that ordinary prose like "v2.5 is out" is not treated as a link. A .ph or .ca domain is not on it. |
| A phone number inside a screenshot | Nothing reads images. The image filter hides any comment carrying a photo or video — not because of what is in it — so it is a blunt instrument: switching it on hides customers' product photos too. |
| A comment containing one of your whitelist words | The whitelist is a list of words, not people. A comment containing any of them is exempt from everything, including hide-all and blocked users. It is checked immediately after the enabled switch, before every other test. |
What Mentbot will not do here
Stated plainly, so you do not build a workflow on top of something that is not there.
- Hide and delete share one setting for the whole Page — you cannot delete links and merely hide phone numbers. The one exception is hide-all, which always hides and never deletes, because the intent there is manual review rather than destruction.
- Filters run in a fixed order and the first hit wins: links, then emails, then phone numbers, then images, then mentions, then emoji-only. There is no per-filter action.
- Moderation runs before reply rules and short-circuits. A comment it hides gets no auto-reply and no Messenger message — so a customer who pasted their own phone number is hidden rather than helped. There is no address filter: an address with no number or link in it passes.
- There is no OCR, no image analysis and no link-destination checking. It is text matching and payload flags.
Cost at your comment volume
Rules are not metered separately — you pay for comments handled per day across all your Pages, and every plan includes every feature. Prices come straight from the pricing page.
| Comments per day | Plan | Monthly |
|---|---|---|
| 100 | Basic | $9 |
| 1,000 | Pro | $19 |
| 3,000 | Premium | $29 |
Unlimited Pages on every plan, and a 14-day free trial.
Questions
How do I stop competitors leaving their number under my posts?
Turn on the phone-number filter, and add their phrasings — "viber me", "cheaper here", their Page name — to the moderation blacklist. The blacklist uses the same substring matcher as reply keywords, so it is case-insensitive and matches inside longer words.
What is the order of precedence in moderation?
Disabled does nothing. Then the whitelist, which exempts everything. Then blocked users, which take your chosen action. Then hide-all, which always hides. Then the blacklist, then the six content filters in their fixed order. The first match decides.
Should I choose hide or delete?
Hide, almost always. A hidden comment is still visible to its author, so a competitor does not know they have been moderated and does not escalate — and a customer you hid by mistake can be un-hidden. Delete is irreversible and tells the person immediately.
Does hiding a comment stop my reply rules running?
Yes, if moderation is what hid it. Moderation is evaluated first and returns before any rule is evaluated. A rule's own hide-comment toggle is different — that one fires after the rule has replied.
Where is the longer version of this?
The guide below covers the whole moderation setup, including the hide-all workflow and what to do about coordinated spam. This page is only about contact details in comments.
Other templates
Related guide
The long-form version of this, and the tool comparisons.
Every behaviour on this page is checked against Mentbot’s own source. If the product changes and this page does not, tell us.