Run your Telegram bot without the 11 p.m. curl command

Which chats can the bot reach?

A user who pressed start, a group where the bot was added, a channel where it holds admin rights. That is the reachable set, so connecting it is a small decision: your own private conversations sit outside the integration, and there is no route from a handle to a message. The announcement channel, the ops group and the support chat are where the work is anyway.

Read what arrived while nobody was watching

A companion long-polls for what has come in since the last acknowledged offset, up to a hundred updates at a time. The Bot API hands over new traffic rather than an archive, so the reading surface is everything since the last look.

That is what a routine is for. Run one every twenty minutes and it reads what arrived, triages it, and writes the interesting half into a sheet, a ticket or a note, which is data extraction pointed at a chat app. The durable copy is what you keep once the update stream moves past.

Can a bot ask the group and act on the answer?

Yes, and nobody deploys a callback handler for it.

The send tool accepts an inline keyboard as a plain object, and a matching tool acknowledges the button tap, which Telegram requires or the tapping user watches a spinner forever. Two buttons in front of a group, and the companion reads the result.

Polls, photos and documents are first-class sends, though files go by public URL rather than upload: a link Telegram can fetch. Editing keeps a status post live instead of piling up duplicates. Deleting covers your bot’s own messages within a couple of days, or anything in a group or channel where it holds admin rights. Run the lot as a recurring operations job and it is most of what a small team needs from a bot.

• "Post the release note to the announcements channel, with the changelog link, and pin it."
• "Ask the ops group whether we hold the deploy, two buttons, and tell me the result."

Every send stops on an approval card

A Telegram message is instant, public to whoever is in the chat, and cannot be quietly unsent once the deletion window closes. Sending, editing, deleting, forwarding, pinning and posting a poll all pause on a card showing the destination chat and the exact body. You approve once, for the session, always, or never, and Ask Always mode in Settings → AI permissions removes the defaults if you would rather be asked about everything.

Each send is one call to one chat, and the bot only reaches chats that already admitted it. Bulk unsolicited messaging does not fit through this surface, and nothing here is an invitation to try.

Frequently asked questions