Suggestion bot for a channel

Predlozhka: a bot that takes post suggestions for a Telegram channel

A suggestion bot for Telegram channels: subscribers send posts, moderators decide, and the bot publishes now, in a queue or at a set time. You can connect your own channel.

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An album of three photos and the moderation panel with decision buttons, a mockup of the bot screen

The task

Subscribers send news and photos to the admin in private messages, the admin copies them into the channel by hand and loses half. The channel needs a suggestion box: people send a post to a bot, moderators decide, the bot publishes.

What we built

One bot for many channels, your channel connects in three steps
Post preview, albums of up to 10 items, an anonymous or named signature
Moderation panel: publish now, queue by slots, schedule, reject, ban
A queue, stats, limits for authors and a sandbox with no channel

A demo you can actually use

Predlozhka is a studio demo, but the bot works for real. It is @ashehaipostbot, and you can connect your own channel to it: give the bot the right to post, send it the channel link, and subscribers can start suggesting posts. The bot checks in Telegram that you own or run the channel, so nobody can connect someone else’s. If you have no channel, the sandbox makes you both the author and the moderator in one tap. The channel in the screenshots is made up.

What the author sees

The author sends text, a photo, a video, a voice message, a file or an album. Telegram delivers an album as a batch of separate messages, and the bot glues it back into one post. The reply is a preview, exactly how the post will look in the channel, and a choice of signature: “Suggested by a subscriber” or the author’s name. The moderators’ decision comes as a reply to the original message. If the author edits or deletes the message before it is published, the moderators see that.

What the moderator sees

“Publish now” posts at once, “Queue” puts the post into the next slot, every three hours from 9 to 21 by default.
“Later” moves the post by an hour, three hours, to the evening or to a custom time, and “Edit text” keeps the formatting.
A post can be rejected with a ready-made reason, and the author banned for a day, a week or for good.
If two moderators press different buttons at the same moment, the first one wins and the post never goes out twice.

Posts in the queue can be moved, and the stats show how many were suggested, published and rejected. The moderation panels can move from private messages into a moderators’ group.

How it is built

The Kurigram (MTProto) bot keeps nothing itself: channels, moderators, the queue and permissions live on a Litestar server with SQLite. The bot never downloads media, Telegram copies it on its side, and the text of a suggestion is erased once it is decided. What to think about when you order such a bot for your channel or a network of channels is on the suggestion bot for a Telegram channel page. The screenshots here are mockups of the bot screens, built from its real texts and buttons.