Telegram Notifications Plugin (discourse-telegram-notifications)

Plugin
1

Discourse Telegram Notifications Plugin

This plugin allows users to receive their notifications via a Telegram bot, allowing them to turn off email notifications and still keep up-to-date. :success:

You can “like” posts, and respond to them via the bot.

Here’s a quick demo video:

Before Starting

  • Your forum must be using HTTPS, and have force_https turned on
  • Your forum must be accessible to the internet, not only an internal network (in development, give ngrok a try).

Getting the plugin setup

  1. Install the plugin using the instructions here: How to install a plugin
  2. Create a telegram bot by talking to the BotFather (instructions here)
  3. Paste the “token” into the site setting “telegram access token”
  4. Tick “telegram notifications enabled”

I strongly recommend you use the BotFather’s /setjoingroups command to disable the bot being used for group chats. It is not designed for it, and risks leaking information that users are not supposed to be able to access (e.g. you don’t want private messages being sent to a group chat).

You can set the name/picture/description of your bot using the instructions here

For users to receive notifications

  1. Send a message to the bot, you’ll receive a message back that looks like

To get notifications for Discourse, enter the ‘Chat ID’ 1234567 in your user preferences

  1. Visit your Discourse user preferences, and paste the number in the Telegram Notifications box
  2. You should now receive notifications by telegram message!

Find out who’s using telegram for notifications

Here’s a query for the data explorer plugin:

SELECT user_id, updated_at, value from user_custom_fields
WHERE name = 'telegram_chat_id'
This is still a work in progress. I think the next task would be to improve the setup flow for the user, so they don't have to copy/paste numbers between telegram and the forum.

Related discussions are: here, here, here and here

As always, suggestions and comments are very welcome :slight_smile:

67 Likes
136

I don’t see anywhere in the docs that it says to create a group, and in fact I see a recommendation to disallow the bot from being added to a group. Send a message directly to the bot, not to a group that includes the bot.

According to the OP (it’s even in a shaded box at the top), they do different things:

1 Like
139

From the OP:

I haven’t done it myself, but that appears to answer the question.

1 Like
181

Hello. Is this feature currently working?

185

I get Internal Server Error when I copy this statement into a new data explorer query.

If I try the statement directly on the database, it works.

Strange. I tried some other of the standard queries available. Some work, but I also got the same error for other queries.

192

Discourse: 3.0.0 stable and 3.0.1 stable

Both versions broke Telegram notifications and so reply to topic trough telegram as well. Regenerating API key is not helping. Replying is not working and the bot is not confirming that reply was sent as it was before.

Any solution for this problem? Or support of this plugin is ended? :frowning:

193

Doesn’t it make more sense to move the Telegram Notifications box from “Profile” to “Notifications”? I did not expect to find it under profile (in my case under the user signature), so I had to search for it. :wink:

1 Like
200

No. This is its purpose:

You might want to look at:

1 Like