Telegram Notifications Plugin (discourse-telegram-notifications)

[david (David Taylor)]

Discourse Telegram Notifications Plugin

Do not confuse this with the discourse-chat-integration plugin, they do different things.

If you want to send notifications about posts to telegram group chats or broadcast channels, use discourse-chat-integration.

If you want users to receive their notifications via telegram, use this plugin.

The two plugins can co-exist, but you MUST connect them to two different telegram bots.

This is not an official plugin (despite @david being a member of the team)

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.

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

2. Visit your Discourse user preferences, and paste the number in the Telegram Notifications box
3. 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'

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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