i think irc is also facing the same problem
Definitely. I think we need to make some strategic decisions about this.
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Great! Burke did a great job outlining the steps for doing this. Once the new Telegram chat for the community is set up with our bot as creator/owner, weāll need to communicate with everyone in the current chat and give them information about making the move. It would be nice to have a timeline of events and share it so that everyone using the current chat is aware of what is happening when and when they need to take action.
I think our best (perhaps only option with Telegram) is to create a new chat for the community using our bot ā 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 itās 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.
Iām 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 weāll be stuck with finding a less intuitive t.me link.
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@jennifer @c.antwi is there anything preventing us from starting on this process right now? The spammers are taking advantage of our being too slow to act.
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Okay. We made some progress today. Not quite ready to shift, but getting close.
Our existing OpenMRS Telegram channel is ownerless. Whoever created the account has left the channel. We have 2 admins, but with limited privileges.
Iāve created a new Telegram account using our OpenMRS phone number, which should protect us from ever losing access to the account when/if an individual leaves the community, meaning we could recover any Telegram group.
I think the next step will be for me to create a new OpenMRS Telegram supergroup using the new OpenMRS account. Then everyone could join the new group. Suranga (one of our remaining admins on the current/old supergroup) could then kick everyone out of the old group except the abandoned creator account and himself. At that point, he would leave the group. Once he leaves, it would be a group with one member (the deleted creator account). Once Suranga leaves, we would lose all control of that supergroup. Iām hopeful (but skeptical) that the old group might be purged at that pointā¦ but most likely it would not.
The downside is that we will lose the t.me/OpenMRS link forever. It will point to the abandoned supergroup and weāll have no way of reclaiming it. Since these links must be unique, we couldnāt use it for our new supergroup and anyone visiting it would end up in an abandoned Telegram group with our community name on it. 
Any Telegram experts with advice on how we could reclaim our supergroup link from an abandoned supergroup?
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@burke, Iāll try making a dummy group with a few of my colleagues, test your hypotheses and get back to you with my findings soon.
Edit: @burke , I can confirm that the group links are not deleted once everyone is out of the group. So we will either have to lose the link or think of a workaround 
Are we able to rename the older channel? Or a pinned topic letting people know we are somewhere else.
Also, I believe weāll need to change the configuration of the Telegram<->IRC bot when that happens.
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Unfortunately, no. As an admin in that channel, Suranga can kick, but he doesnāt have permission to add other admins or edit any settings in the channel.
Well, we submitted a request for hep to Telegram and havenāt heard back. So, weāll just have to move ahead. On the bright side, the faq entry on What do I do if my username is taken? looks like there may be hope:
āWe understand that certain usernames are part of an online identity for some of us. If your desired username is already taken, we will be happy to help you acquire it for your account or channel, provided that you have that same username on at least two of these services: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram.ā
Iāve create a new openmrs_admin Telegram user using our community phone number. Using this account to create any new community Telegram channels should prevent us from ever ending up with owner-less channels in the future. As long as we grant full permissions to at least one admin, we wonāt need to use the openmrs_admin account other than to create new channels.
Iāve created a new channel for us. Join via Telegram: Contact @OpenMRS.
For now, Iāve set the new supergroupās link to Telegram: Contact @OpenMRS1 (thatās what om.rs/tg is pointing to for now).
Next steps:
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@surangak, please kick OpenMRSBot out of the old telegram channel.
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Iāll follow the faq to request the t.me/OpenMRS link to be freed up so we can reclaim it.Request made to Telegram volunteers -
Over time, we can migrate our other Telegram channels (e.g., GSoC, GCI, etc.) to new channels created by
openmrs_admin.
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We have 8 members in the new Telegram chat. If youāre reading this and use Telegram, take a moment to leave the old āOpenMRS Chatā on Telegram and join the new one at https://t.me/OpenMRS1
Yeah this is pretty much still a problem in the main chat. But do you think migrating to a new chat will help? Because there is a high chance that the spammers will make their way to the new chat as well. How are we going to prevent that?
Iām happy to report, thanks to the volunteers at Telegram support, we have reclaimed t.me/OpenMRS for our Telegram channel! 
Using a generic OpenMRS account (connected to the OpenMRS phone number) to create the new channel means we shouldnāt end up with a creator-less channel without sufficient admins again. We now have nearly a dozen admins and can recruit more as needed.
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