Getting started
How to add a bot to a Telegram group and give it the right rights
By the Botable team
Open the group, go to members, add the bot by its @username, and it joins like any member. Anything beyond reading commands — deleting messages, restricting members, pinning — needs it promoted to admin with those specific permissions.
The short version
Adding a bot to a Telegram group is two separate acts that people frequently treat as one. Joining is simple: add it by username through the group's member list, exactly as you would a person. What the bot can then do is governed independently, and by default it is very little. It cannot delete messages, restrict members, pin, or invite anyone, and because privacy mode is on by default it does not even receive ordinary conversation — only messages that start with a slash, replies to its own messages, mentions of itself, and service messages. That default is the single most common reason a bot appears broken immediately after being added. Promoting it to admin grants capabilities one permission at a time, and the correct approach is to grant only the ones its features require, since an over-permissioned bot is a compromise waiting for a bad token day.
Step by step
How do you add the bot?
Open the group, tap the title to open group info, choose Add Members, search for the bot's @username, and confirm. If the bot does not appear, its owner may have disabled group joining with /setjoingroups in BotFather — that setting has to be changed by whoever owns the bot.
How do you promote it to admin?
Group info, Administrators, Add Admin, pick the bot, then enable individual permissions. Grant only what its features need: delete messages for moderation, ban users for enforcement, pin messages if it announces things, invite users if it issues invite links. Leave the rest off.
Why does the bot ignore ordinary messages?
Privacy mode, which is on by default. In that state the bot receives only commands, replies to its own messages, @mentions of itself, and service messages. If it needs to read general conversation — a moderation filter, a keyword watcher — the owner must disable privacy with /setprivacy and then remove and re-add the bot, because the change does not apply retroactively.
How do you check what it can actually do?
Look at the bot's entry under Administrators: the permissions listed there are the truth, whatever anyone assumed. Almost every "the moderation commands do nothing" report resolves to a missing permission rather than a broken bot, and Telegram fails these silently rather than with an error.
What catches people out
- Privacy mode is on by default, so a fresh bot ignores everything that is not a command
- Changing privacy mode does not affect groups the bot is already in — remove and re-add it
- Missing admin permissions cause silent failures, not error messages, which is why they are hard to diagnose
Questions
Does a bot need to be an admin to work in a group?
Not for answering commands — an ordinary member bot handles that fine. Admin is required only for acting on the group: deleting, restricting, banning, pinning, or issuing invite links.
Can one bot serve many groups?
Yes, and that is the normal case. The same bot can be in hundreds of groups, each with its own settings and data if it stores them per chat id. Nothing needs to be duplicated per group.
Want a bot that does this?
Describe it in plain language and Botable writes the code, gives the bot its own database, deploys it and keeps it running. Everything on this page is handled for you — the token, the webhook, the storage, the hosting.
Keep reading
- Group privacy modetelegram bot privacy mode
- Bot admin rightstelegram bot admin rights
- Create a Telegram bothow to create a telegram bot