The whole process will be:

1. create community, get group id, and access token

2. enable community messages and bot abilities

Get Group ID and Access Token

You need to have a VK personal account first, go to https://vk.com (opens a new window), register, and log in yourself.

Go to "Community" from the left sidebar and "Create Community" for your chatbot.

Click on "Create token", Tick the options, and hit "Create".

You will need to download the VK application on your phone because VK will send you notifications for confirming some actions of the community.

Copy your token and group id and now let's go back to OCP.

Go to the VK channel, click "Add New Bot" and fill in your group id and access token, hit "Add".

Forgot your group id? You can find the community information page here:

After the connection, your page looks like this:

Click "Create Bot", select a template, and be done.

Add a simple greeting message for testing.

Enable Community Messages and Bot Abilities

To talk to your bot, you need to enable community messages first. Follow steps 1 to 4 in the above screenshot to do so.

Then go to "Bot settings", change the bot abilities to "Enabled" and make sure you hit the "Save" button and see the green "Changes saved" prompt. It's important to enable bot abilities so that your bot can send buttons, questions, and cards instead of just text messages and media.

Talk to Vk Bot

Now you can open your VK application on your phone, search your community name and click on it:

Click on "Message" to start the conversation.

VK Limitation

There are several limitations on the VK channel according to their API:

1. In a card, the image should have a 13/8 ratio and there should be at least one button otherwise the card won't show.

2. In a question step, there are 5 quick answers at most.

3. In a file question, the file uploaded by the user is sent to VK and VK returns an URL pointing to the file back to OCP. Please note that this URL isn't a direct file link. Therefore you cannot send a file-type message based on this URL. You can print the URL instead and by clicking this URL, users can access the file.