Test sends & delivery history.
Prove the channel works before you rely on it, then read the last twenty sends. The one thing to internalise: a failed delivery is never retried and never announced — the history is where you find out.
The Test button on a channel row sends a sample brief to that channel immediately, so you find out today whether your webhook works — instead of at 7am tomorrow, when nothing arrives and nothing tells you why.
Why you should always test
Slack and Discord channels are marked verified the moment you paste the webhook URL. Nothing calls that URL to check it. The badge means “this looks like a webhook”, not “we reached it”.
So a webhook with a typo, or one that was deleted in Slack last month, shows exactly the same green Verified badge as a working one. The Test button is the only thing that tells the two apart, and it takes about two seconds.
The test brief is fake — don't act on it
The test sends a realistic sample brief, not your real one. The rivals in it are fictional, the “pricing change” never happened, and the two social posts were never written for you. It exists to prove the pipe works end to end — formatting, chunking, delivery — and nothing in it is a fact about your market.
Concretely, a test send contains:
- A verdict line saying the channel is connected.
- Two sample rival signals — a pricing change, and a thought-leadership post — with impact scores.
- A sample next move.
- Two sample social posts (LinkedIn and Instagram), with hashtags and a call to action.
- A sample blog suggestion, with an outline.
Every one of those is placeholder copy. If a colleague forwards you the test in a panic about a competitor raising prices, this is the paragraph to send back.
A successful test verifies the channel
If the platform accepts the message, ScoutRival flips the channel to Verified — a real, earned verification this time, on the evidence that the target is reachable. You'll see a green confirmation line under the row.
If it fails, the row shows the reason inline, in red. That's the platform's own complaint, trimmed — a 404 usually means the webhook no longer exists; a 403 means it exists but you're not allowed to post to it.
Delivery history — your last 20 sends
Under the channel list, the Delivery history card lists your last 20 sends for this brand — newest first. Each row carries the channel, the timestamp, and a status:
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Sent | The platform accepted the message. |
| Queued | Recorded, not yet confirmed as delivered. |
| Failed | The platform rejected it. A warning icon sits next to the badge. |
Hover the warning icon on a failed row and you get the raw platform error — the HTTP status and the message the platform actually returned. That's the string to paste into a support message; it's usually enough to diagnose the problem on its own.
A test send is logged like any other delivery. If your history shows a burst of sends at odd hours, that's you pressing Test, not a scheduling fault. It also means a failed test is preserved with its error — you don't have to catch the red line before it disappears.
Failed deliveries are not retried
The morning delivery runs once. If your channel rejects it, ScoutRival records the failure and moves on — there is no retry, and no notification to tell you the brief never landed. The brief itself was still generated and is sitting in the app; only the delivery failed.
Which makes the delivery history the single place you'd ever find out. Two habits are worth forming:
- If a morning goes quiet, check the history before anything else. A row of red Failed badges answers the question instantly — and the hovered error tells you what broke.
- Re-test after any change on the platform side. Deleting a Slack app, archiving a channel, rotating a webhook, or removing the Discord integration all break the URL silently.
Delivery is also idempotent within a day: once a brief is marked sent to a channel, it won't be sent to that channel again. You will never get the same brief twice.
Telegram: no Test button until it's linked
A Telegram row that still says Pending has no Test button — there's nowhere to send to yet, because the bot hasn't captured your chat.
Tap Connect Telegram, press Start in the bot, then refresh the page. The row flips to Verified and the Test button appears. Full Telegram setup →