Install

Lost your widget key? Read it off your own site.

Your key is already printed in the HTML of every page the chat runs on. You almost never need to make a new one — and making a new one is what takes a live chat offline. Start with the copy you already have.

Open your dashboard All install guides

Do this first

Copy the key from your live site

Takes about a minute and changes nothing. Works on any platform, from any computer, whether or not you are signed in.

Open your website in a normal browser tab on a computer.
Show the page source: Ctrl+U on Windows, Option+Cmd+U on a Mac. Or right-click the page and choose View page source.
Search inside that source: Ctrl+F (Windows) or Cmd+F (Mac), then type data-tenant.
The match looks like data-tenant="chat_…". The value inside the quotes is your widget key. Copy it.

Save it now. Put it in your password manager or your notes. It is not a secret in the ordinary sense — it sits in your public HTML — but losing it again costs you this page.

Nothing found? Two common reasons. One: the chat was never installed on this page, so there is no key to read — check another page, or your homepage. Two: the tag was added through a tag manager such as Cloudflare Zaraz, which injects it in the browser rather than in the delivered HTML. In that case the tag is not in View page source at all. Right-click the page, choose Inspect, open the Elements tab, and search there for data-tenant instead.

Check it

Is this key still valid?

A public check that needs no sign-in. Paste one address into your browser.

https://api.orcalinq.com/api/widget/debug?key=chat_YOURKEY

Replace chat_YOURKEY with your key and press Enter. You get a short block of machine-readable text back.

"reason": "unknown_key" — this key no longer exists on our side. Something replaced it. Read the rest of this page before pressing anything in the dashboard.
Anything else — the key is live. key_tied_to_domain tells you which website it belongs to, and registered_domains lists every address on your account.

To test one exact web address, add it on the end:

https://api.orcalinq.com/api/widget/debug?key=chat_YOURKEY&origin=https://yoursite.com

"origin_accepted": true means the chat is allowed to load there. false means the key is fine but that address is not registered — the usual cause is www. on the front of one and not the other. The reply spells that out in plain words when it spots it.

New laptop

Why the dashboard has forgotten your key

We only ever show the key once, when the website is first added or when the key is replaced. After that we keep a copy in the browser you were using at the time — nowhere else. We do not store a readable copy on our servers, so no screen anywhere can show it to you again.

So on a new laptop, a new browser, or after clearing your browsing data, Domains → Installation shows the snippet with the placeholder YOUR_API_KEY instead of your key, and the button beside it reads Mint key rather than Rotate.

That button is not a "show me my key" button. Mint key and Rotate are the same action with two labels. Both replace the live key and take your working chat offline until you paste the new snippet onto your site. If your chat is currently working, do not press either — copy the key off your site instead, as above, and paste it into the snippet yourself.

The snippet is only ever this, with your key in place of chat_YOURKEY:

<script async src="https://api.orcalinq.com/w.js"
        data-tenant="chat_YOURKEY"
        data-api="https://api.orcalinq.com"></script>

The two buttons

What Rotate and Forget actually do

Rotate (shown as "Mint key" when this browser has no copy)

You are asked to confirm first. The confirmation says, in effect: any existing install snippet on this website will stop working until you replace it with the new key.
The old key stops working straight away. There is no overlap period.
Only the website you are looking at is affected. Every other website on your account keeps its own key.
The new key appears in a box that says it is the only time it will be shown. Copy it into your password manager there and then. We also save it into the browser you are using.
Your chat is now offline on that website until you copy the fresh snippet and paste it over the old one, everywhere it appears.

Forget

Clears this browser's saved copy only. Your live key is untouched and your website keeps working.
Afterwards the snippet box shows the YOUR_API_KEY placeholder again, and the only button left is Mint key — the destructive one.
So use Forget when you are on a borrowed or shared computer, and only once the key is saved somewhere else.

Warning banner

"The snippet below contains a stale widget key"

This appears when the key saved in the browser you are using is not the key our servers currently hold for that website. The snippet is greyed out and the copy button is switched off on purpose, so you cannot paste a broken tag onto your site.

It usually means one of two things: the website row was deleted and added again, or the key was replaced from a different browser or a different person's login.

Before you press Rotate, check whether your site is actually broken. Open your website in a private window. If the chat bubble still appears, the live key is fine and only this browser's saved copy is wrong — read the real key off your site as above, paste it into the snippet by hand, and ignore the banner. If the bubble does not appear either, then the live key is genuinely gone and Rotate is the right fix.

In order

The safe sequence

Read the key off your live site.
Check it with the public address above.
If it is valid — you are done. Save it and carry on.
If it is not valid, or the site is not installed anywhere yet — then rotate, copy the new key from the one-time box, and paste the fresh snippet onto every place the old one appeared.
Confirm in a private window, then run Domains → Installation → Diagnose in your dashboard at app.orcalinq.com for a server-side check.

If that did not work

Still stuck

Rotated, pasted the new snippet, and the bubble is still missing. Your site is probably serving cached HTML. Purge the cache in your caching plugin or host control panel, then check again in a private window — a normal reload can serve you the old page.
You rotated and then lost the new key too. Rotate again. The install is already broken, so there is nothing further to lose, and this time copy the key out of the one-time box before closing it.
The chat bubble appears on one address but not another. That is not the key — it is the address. example.com and www.example.com count as two different websites. Add both, or add one wildcard entry covering the whole domain.
You cannot get into the dashboard at all. Sign-in is by email link, so you do not need a remembered password — request a fresh link at app.orcalinq.com. If the email account itself is gone, write to support@orcalinq.com from the address on the account.
Somebody else can see your key. Expected. It travels in your public HTML and only permits the chat to start from the web addresses you registered. Rotate it if you want to, but there is no leak to contain.

Keep the key where you will find it.

One line in your password manager now saves a broken chat later. Rotate is a repair, not a reminder.