Telegram

You can enable Telegram for a user or admin notifications and user auth.

To set up notifications or auth with Telegram, first, you need to create a bot and write its access token to the remark42 configuration.

Getting bot token for Telegram

To get a token, talk to BotFather. All you need is to send /newbot command and choose the name for your bot (it must end in bot). That is it, and you got a token which you'll need to write down into remark42 configuration as TELEGRAM_TOKEN.

Example of such a "talk":

Umputun:
/newbot

BotFather:
Alright, a new bot. How are we going to call it? Please choose a name for your bot.

Umputun:
example_comments

BotFather:
Good. Now let's choose a username for your bot. It must end in `bot`. Like this, for example: TetrisBot or tetris_bot.

Umputun:
example_comments_bot

BotFather:
Done! Congratulations on your new bot. You will find it at t.me/example_comments_bot. You can now add a description, about section and profile picture for your bot, see /help for a list of commands. By the way, when you've finished creating your cool bot, ping our Bot Support if you want a better username for it. Just make sure the bot is fully operational before you do this.

Use this token to access the HTTP API:
12345678:xy778Iltzsdr45tg

For a description of the Bot API, see this page: https://core.telegram.org/bots/api

Authentication

To enable Telegram authentication for the users, set the variable AUTH_TELEGRAM=true.

Notifications

Notifications for administrators

To integrate notifications about any comment on your sites with remark42 with Telegram

1. Set NOTIFY_ADMINS=telegram

2. Set up your notification destination and add its ID to remark42 configuration as NOTIFY_TELEGRAM_CHAN

   Notifications can be sent to:

   • Channels: Create a channel and add your bot as Administrator
   • Groups: Create a group and add your bot to it
   • Individual users: Use the user's Telegram ID

   For the ID, you can use:

   • Public channels/groups: Use the username without the @ symbol (e.g., mygroup instead of @mygroup)
   • Private channels/groups: Use the numeric ID
   • Users: Use the user's numeric Telegram ID

   To obtain IDs:

   • For public channel/group ID: Forward any message from it to @JsonDumpBot and look for id in forward_from_chat
   • For private channels/groups: Use these instructions or @myidbot
   • For user ID: Users can get their ID from @myidbot

   Note: When using channels or groups, ensure the bot has "Post messages" permission.

Notifications for users

Enabling Telegram user notifications allows users to sign up for notifications about replies to their messages. To do it, set the variable NOTIFY_USERS=telegram.

Technical details

Telegram notifications formatting is limited by Telegram API and, because of that, lose most of the formatting of the original comment. Notification implementation of the remark42 backend takes the rendered HTML of the comment and strips it of the unsupported tags before sending it to Telegram. To mitigate this, h1-h6 are replaced with supported <b> tag.