Telegram chat has no admins and is having spammer issues [SOLVED]

@cintiadr i’ll volunteer to help help out with @reubenv…How do we get to that ?

I was just suggesting but if given links on how the Talk - News Bot was configured it would be my pleasure

If it doesn’t require great devop skills, then can you curate me into doing that ?I previously tried to dockerise some of my projects but ,went back to more traditional ways because i saw no real need to do it for the target platforms which i had in mind

@r0bby Thanks alot ,for the links , how do we get privilges to set up and configuire these bots ?

cc @cintiadr

We need @pascal or @surangak to grant admin to you and @reubenv. I’ve asked via email, hopefully they will answer. Nothing can be done if that doesn’t happen. They are the only admins and there’s no way for us to recover it on any other way.

Certainly. Can you send me your ssh public key via PM? So I grant you access to the machine currently running it and information on what needs to be done, and what I know about the bot. Just note that’s the production machine.

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Sent as requested .

Done

I need a docker-compose following the specification on the readme.

Unfortunately, we cannot add admins to our Telegram chat because the creator has left. Only Suranga & Pascal are left as admins and they cannot add others). Additionally, without an owner of the chat we cannot change the short link (t.me/openmrs). I have been coordinating with @surangak. He has been kicking out some spanners here & there, but it’s not a viable longterm solution.

I think our best (perhaps only option with Telegram) is to create a new chat for the community using our bot – i.e., like the old liberbot, make sure our bot account is the creator/owner and never leaves the chat. If it works, the bot could be owner of all our chats (infra, meetings, etc.) and protect us from ending up with owner-less Telegram chats in the future.

If there is any hope of not losing our t.me/openmrs link, this will need to be coordinated:

  1. Have the bot create a new supergroup chat to become the new community chat. Specifically avoid setting a custom t.me link for it.
  2. Everybody except Suranga leaves the old chat and Suranga kicks out any stragglers until it’s only him and the deleted owner account left in the chat.
  3. Suranga leaves the current chat (so the only member is a deleted account).
  4. Hopefully, the current/original community chat containing only a deleted account is auto-purged and frees up our t.me link.
  5. We reclaim the t.me/openmrs link for our new bot-owned supergroup chat.

I’m hoping (perhaps wishful thinking) that a chat containing only a deleted account will be deleted, which would free up the t.me/openmrs link for our new chat room. Otherwise, t.me/openmrs will send people to an old, spam-filled chat and we’ll be stuck with finding a less intuitive t.me link.


Alternately, we could switch from using Telegram to using our Slack channel. :slight_smile:

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Is the creator still alive? We could talk to him or her. :slight_smile:

@dkayiwa it’s not possible to pass the ownership of group in telegram. And their account is deleted, not sure then could recover it anyway.

@burke do you mean replacing telegram + irc by slack? The biggest inconvenience is the limitation on number of visible messages.

Other possibility to replace telegram would be whatsapp. There’s no ‘owner’, just a group of admins all with same permissions. There’s a couple of whatsapp <-> irc gateways available, not sure how well they work. But bots are not a thing.

Except that’s not open source. Granted neither is telegram but…I have no skin the game though.

We have a Slack channel?! I had no idea. I think we should start using it. :slight_smile:

There has been a slack for a longgggg time – and you should maybe consider moving and using Rocket Chat or Zulip instead – which are Open Source, whereas slack is “just okay”. I like Zulip’s threading model for conversations – it’s better.

I will occasionally pop in, but I don’t want to take on any roles with OpenMRS. If you’re curious of the history of why – have a peek at the past posts of mine…it’s partially why I’m not leading the infra team as I was. See past Topics and Replies.

Thanks Cintia :heart:

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How far with this issue now, I can still see spammers posting their stuff on irc.

cc @reubenv , @c.antwi , @jennifer , @janflowers , @tendomart, @cintiadr , @dkayiwa , @burke

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Not very far I guess @irenyak1 since we haven’t managed to get in touch with the admins of the group :slightly_frowning_face:

@reubenv do think they are still alive? Could there be anyone with their direct contact? We need to move as fast as we can before these spammers start throwing porn on our chat. They are very persistent.

Maybe we should start a completely new group? It looks like we have not made any headway

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@burke explained what he thinks we can do in this post. So I suppose it’s a matter of someone scheduling it and attempt to do it.

Trying to test IRC-Telegram Bot as we want to Dockerize the channels so may be we’ll have a solution soon.

cc. @irenyak1

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Sorry, what’s your solution?

Because dockerising the irc<->telegram bot won’t help anything with spammers.

Nor with the lack of admins. It’s just one less service in a snowflake machine, but it’s a tech debt from our side.

@c.antwi do you think you can schedule this?