WeChat Auto-Reply: Only Subscribe Works | Generated by AI

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Question: How do I set up auto-reply for (1) new subscriber thanks, (2) article likes/”in-app reward” (点赞/在看), and (3) reward money (赞赏) on a WeChat Official Account (公众号)?

Answer:

Only #1 is actually possible through the official API. #2 and #3 are not exposed to developers at all — confirmed by checking the current WeChat MP docs.

1. Subscribe (关注) auto-thanks — fully doable

WeChat pushes a subscribe event to your configured server URL whenever someone follows. You reply synchronously within 5s with an XML payload (or empty string if you don’t want to reply immediately).

from flask import Flask, request, Response
import time

app = Flask(__name__)

THANK_YOU_TEXT = "Thanks for following! 🙏"

@app.route("/wechat", methods=["GET", "POST"])
def wechat():
    if request.method == "GET":
        # signature verification for initial server config
        return request.args.get("echostr", "")

    xml = request.data.decode("utf-8")
    from_user = extract(xml, "FromUserName")
    to_user = extract(xml, "ToUserName")
    event = extract(xml, "Event")

    if event == "subscribe":
        reply = f"""<xml>
<ToUserName><![CDATA[{from_user}]]></ToUserName>
<FromUserName><![CDATA[{to_user}]]></FromUserName>
<CreateTime>{int(time.time())}</CreateTime>
<MsgType><![CDATA[text]]></MsgType>
<Content><![CDATA[{THANK_YOU_TEXT}]]></Content>
</xml>"""
        return Response(reply, mimetype="application/xml")

    return Response("success")  # ack anything else, no auto-reply

def extract(xml, tag):
    import re
    m = re.search(f"<{tag}><!\\[CDATA\\[(.*?)\\]\\]></{tag}>", xml)
    return m.group(1) if m else ""

If message encryption is enabled in MP console, you’ll also need to AES-decrypt the POST body first — wechatpy (pip) handles this cleanly instead of hand-rolling XML parsing:

from wechatpy import parse_message, create_reply
from wechatpy.crypto import WeChatCrypto

crypto = WeChatCrypto(token, encoding_aes_key, app_id)
decrypted = crypto.decrypt_message(request.data, msg_signature, timestamp, nonce)
msg = parse_message(decrypted)
if msg.type == "event" and msg.event == "subscribe":
    reply = create_reply(THANK_YOU_TEXT, msg)
    return Response(crypto.encrypt_message(reply.render(), nonce, timestamp))

2. Article likes / “在看” — no hook exists

There’s no event type for this in the push spec. WeChat’s server event pushes only cover: subscribe/unsubscribe, SCAN, LOCATION, CLICK/VIEW (menu), template-message status, and a few others — 点赞/在看 on articles is UI-only telemetry Tencent doesn’t surface to the Official Account backend at all. There is no polling endpoint either.

3. Reward money (赞赏) — also no hook, and it doesn’t even go through your account

This is the key thing people miss: article 赞赏 money settles directly to the author’s personal WeChat wallet via a separate “赞赏账户” mini-program (T+7 settlement), not to your official-account-linked merchant account. Tencent’s own docs on this describe it as an author-invitation flow entirely outside the developer API — there’s no notify/callback because your server was never in that payment path to begin with.

Workaround if you actually want a reward flow you control: don’t use native article 赞赏. Instead wire up your own WeChat Pay JSAPI/Native order (a real merchant order, not the article reward widget) — that does give you a notify_url payment callback, and from there you can push a customer-service message via the /cgi-bin/message/custom/send API to thank the payer. That’s the only path to something resembling “auto-reply to reward.”

References:

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