What a bot actually is here
The word sounds more dramatic than it is.
A Telegram bot is just a second account that belongs to you and can be controlled by software instead of by fingers.
It has its own name, its own picture, and its own key. When Tublish posts to your channel, it is signing in as that bot, not as you.
That separation is the useful part. Your personal Telegram account is never handed over to anybody, and if you ever want the arrangement to stop, you delete the bot and everything stops with it.
Step one: make the bot
Telegram makes bots through another bot, which is a strange sentence but a short process.
- Open Telegram and search for @BotFather. It has a blue tick.
- Start a chat with it and send: /newbot
- It asks for a name. This is what people see. Your channel's name is a fine answer.
- It asks for a username. This one has to be unique across all of Telegram and must end in the word bot, like thetestkitchen_bot.
- It replies with a long line that looks like 123456789:AAH-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx. That is your token.
Step two: let the bot into your channel
This is the step almost everybody misses, and it is why a bot that was set up correctly still won't post.
Making a bot does not give it access to anything. You have to add it to your channel, as an administrator.
- Open your channel and go to Manage channel, then Administrators.
- Choose Add administrator and search for your bot by the username you just picked.
- Give it permission to post messages. It does not need any of the others.
- Save.
If you don't have a channel yet, make one first. In Telegram that's the pencil or plus button, then New channel.
A channel is the broadcast kind of chat: you write, everyone reads, and nobody replies over the top of you.
Step three: connect it to Tublish
Open your Space, go to Platforms, and choose Telegram. It asks for two things.
- The token @BotFather gave you.
- Your channel, which you can write as @yourchannel, or just paste the t.me link.
Tublish checks both before it saves anything. It asks Telegram whether the token belongs to a real bot, and then whether that bot can actually see the channel you named.
So a mistyped channel name fails right there on the screen, while you are looking at it, instead of silently failing on your first real post a week later.
What Telegram will and won't allow
A few limits worth knowing before they surprise you.
- A message can be 4,096 characters. That is long, roughly two pages.
- A picture's caption is shorter, 1,024 characters. When your words are longer than that, Tublish sends the writing first and the picture straight after, so nothing gets cut.
- A bot can post to channels and groups, but it cannot post to your personal Telegram feed. There isn't one.
- A bot cannot message a person who has never written to it first. That is Telegram protecting its users from spam, and it is a good rule.
If it doesn't work
- Nothing arrives, no error: the bot is almost certainly not an administrator of the channel yet, or it is missing the post messages permission.
- The token is rejected: check you copied the whole line including the numbers before the colon.
- The channel is rejected: use the public @name. If the channel is private it has no @name, and you'll need its numeric id instead.
- It worked yesterday and not today: if you sent /revoke to @BotFather at some point, the old token died that moment. Paste the new one.
Once it is connected you can forget it exists, which is the point.
Write your post once in Tublish, tick Telegram along with everywhere else you post, and it goes out with the rest.