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How to lose all users of your telegram bot. Brief instruction

This instructive story happened on a beautiful day on December 8, 2019. On this day, I remembered that the phone our bot was dialed on was framed by a sympathetic saleswoman from the Euroset and, in which case, would disappear overnight because of the inability to restore it and drag our bot with it into oblivion.

It was necessary to transfer the bot to another phone in a commendable proactive mode.
Having run the removal of the test bot in one account and instant registration in another, we made sure that everything works as expected and repeated the procedure on the battlefield. Here's how it looked:



Being completely sure of what we were doing, we pressed the appropriate buttons and received a message that the bot was successfully removed. After that, we instantly registered the bot from under another account, connected a new token and hastened to make sure that everything switched seamlessly.

Here's what we saw and what the other 500 of our former target users saw in the list of accounts where the bot was:



The next day, when the desire to understand returned, it became clear that the nickname is not a simple link (such as domain names ), but is inextricably attached to a certain essence of the bot, to which users who start the bot are also attached. By deleting the bot, together with the link, you delete the entity that users have authorized to communicate with them.

In the test run, we inadvertently and hastily accessed the bot from the target account, which was not registered in it at the time of the transfer and did not encounter this problem.

After that, there were calls to the telegram support asking them to dig out the list of users in backups. These requests were expected to meet a cold silence.

Constructive suggestions to the Telegram team


  • Explain this point to people who remove the bot. Now its non-obviousness> 9000
  • Perhaps it makes sense to make a button in BotFather for a dedicated caliper for bot and account owners, where you can differentiate, says a 9th grade student pressed down by hormones or an owner of a business with an audience of tens of thousands of people who spent a lot of money and time on promoting the bot and simultaneously promoting popularization your product

The path of a noble husband


The correct approach for this situation would be to completely transfer the account to another phone number provided by telegram. Disconnecting the bot and the user account at the moment is possible, it seems, only in the above dramatic way.

If you find yourself in such a situation, users who really need your bot and who will not be confused by the message that it has been deleted or blocked will find the strength to drive it again in the search and start. There will be a minority of such users. You will lose most of them permanently or permanently.

Try to avoid this.

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