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:
- Have the bot create a new supergroup chat to become the new community chat. Specifically avoid setting a custom t.me link for it.
- 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.
- Suranga leaves the current chat (so the only member is a deleted account).
- Hopefully, the current/original community chat containing only a deleted account is auto-purged and frees up our t.me link.
- 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. 