Steven Thiel
Business problem
The current respond.io n8n nodes need a broader overhaul to make them reliable and usable in real workflow scenarios. Several node behaviors are either buggy or too limited for scalable automation, which makes it difficult to build dependable workflows in production.
Users are using respond.io nodes in n8n for workflow automation, but several specific issues are blocking reliable usage in practice:
  • The “Remove Many Tags” operator does not reliably fetch all tags. Instead, it often only allows selecting specific tags after loading a user first and viewing that user’s tags, which makes the operator difficult or sometimes impossible to use dynamically in workflows.
  • Error handling is broken. Even when “continue on error” or an error path is configured, the workflow still continues through the normal success path, which makes proper fallback handling impossible.
  • Custom fields do not behave like default fields in the n8n UI. If fields are present in the node UI and not manually removed, they may overwrite existing values with empty data. This creates a major workflow risk, because forgetting to remove unused fields can unintentionally overwrite all existing custom field values.
  • Contact search is too broad and lacks field-specific filtering. When similar or identical values exist across multiple fields, results may match the wrong data because users cannot explicitly search by specific field(s).
  • The API result limit is too restrictive. Currently, only 100 users can be fetched per API call, which makes bulk actions and larger automations difficult to implement properly.
  • Lifecycle nodes do not dynamically fetch current lifecycle values. Instead, lifecycle values must be entered manually one by one, so any lifecycle change made in respond.io can break existing workflows and force users to manually find and update every affected node.
Desired outcome
Improve the respond.io n8n nodes so they are reliable and usable for real-world automation. This should include fixing broken error handling, preventing empty-field overwrites, improving tag selection and contact search behavior, making bulk operations more practical, and ensuring lifecycle nodes dynamically fetch the latest available lifecycle values.