Telegram channels

How MagicPost posts to Telegram channels and groups through a bot, with post limits, first comments and analytics.

Telegram has no developer app for users to sign in to. Posts go out through a bot. You create one bot for the whole site with @BotFather, and users can bring a bot of their own if you allow it. Users link their Telegram account, add the bot to the channels and groups they run, and each chat becomes a channel in MagicPost.

Set up Telegram

Create the bot, save its token and connect your first chat.

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How it fits together

	Telegram
What posts	The site’s bot, or a bot a user brings when you allow it
What a user links	Their Telegram account, then each channel or group
Can post to	Channels, groups and supergroups, including groups with topics
Counts against the plan	Each connected chat is one channel
Webhook path	/webhooks/telegram

The label under a channel’s name, Channel or Group, says which kind of chat it is.

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Post types and limits

Telegram has one post type, Message.

	Message
Text	Up to 4,096 characters
Caption under media	Up to 1,024 characters
Images	Up to 10 (jpg, jpeg, png, webp), 10 MB each
Video	Up to 10 (mp4), 50 MB each, or 2,000 MB with your own Bot API server
Pictures and videos together	Yes, up to 10 files in all
First comment	Yes, where the bot can reach the comments
Options	Send silently, Protect content, Turn off the link preview, Forum topic

Text goes out exactly as typed, with no formatting, so write plain text. One file goes out as one message. Two to ten files go out as an album, with the text as the caption of the first. In the composer, the options sit in the Settings for card of each Telegram channel. Forum topic appears only for a group with topics: enter the number at the end of the topic’s link, or leave it blank to post in General.

Posts to Telegram are sent by the queue, so the scheduler has to be running. See Cron and queue.

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First comment

A first comment is posted as a reply right after the post.

• Groups. The comment replies to the post.
• Channels. Telegram copies each channel post into the channel’s linked discussion group, and the comment replies to that copy. This needs a discussion group linked to the channel with the bot as an admin in it. Without one, the First comment box is not offered for that channel.

If a comment fails, the post stays published, and its page says “The first comment was not posted:” followed by the reason.

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Analytics

Telegram does not tell a bot how often a post was viewed, forwarded or clicked, so MagicPost does not show those figures. It shows what the bot is told:

• Reactions on the post, and Replies in a group or Comments in a channel.
• Subscribers, the chat’s member count, read every hour.

Reactions are counted only while the bot is an admin of the chat, and comments on a channel’s posts only while it is an admin of the discussion group. See Analytics.