Description

A two-way bridge between a forum and a Telegram group. Posts go out; replies come back and become real forum posts, written by the member who wrote them.

Why two-way

Sending forum posts to a Telegram channel is something you can already do with any webhook tool, including one you may already own. The half nobody offers is the return path: a message typed in the Telegram group becoming a post in the forum, attributed to the member who typed it, so the conversation is in one place instead of two.

How members are identified

A member links their own account from their forum settings. They are shown a one-time code, and they send that code to the bot in a direct message never in the group, because a code pasted into a group is a code everybody in it can use.

Until somebody links, their messages are ignored rather than guessed at. If you would rather nothing was lost, you can nominate an account for unlinked messages instead — but the strict setting always wins, so turning it on cannot be undone by a stray configuration elsewhere.

What it will not do

• It will not post its own messages back to the forum, or forum posts that arrived from Telegram back to Telegram. The loop is closed in both directions.

• It will not accept a call to its endpoint that cannot prove it came from Telegram, and it fails closed rather than open if the secret is missing.

• It will not post the same message twice when Telegram retries a delivery.

Requirements

• Invision Community 5

• A Telegram bot token from @BotFather — free

• Your community reachable over HTTPS, so Telegram can deliver to it