Connect a Telegram channel

How to connect a Telegram channel to Papera and publish to it. Telegram has no sign-in flow for this: you publish to a channel through a bot that you create and make an administrator of that channel. The bot's token is the credential — Papera stores it server-side and it never reaches the browser.

Because the bot is yours, nothing needs approving by Telegram and there is no app to register. The trade is that setup takes three short steps in Telegram before you connect.

1. Create a bot

Do this in Telegram, not in Papera:

1. Open a chat with @BotFather (https://t.me/BotFather).
2. Send /newbot and follow the prompts: a display name, then a username ending in bot (e.g. acme_news_bot).
3. BotFather replies with a token that looks like 123456789:AAE.... Copy it — it is the credential Papera will use.

Treat the token like a password. Anyone holding it can post as your bot. You can revoke it at any time with /revoke in BotFather, which immediately stops Papera (and anything else) from publishing with it.

2. Make the bot an admin of your channel

1. Open your channel in Telegram and go to Manage channel → Administrators → Add administrator.
2. Search for your bot by its username and add it.
3. Leave Post messages enabled. That is the only permission Papera needs — you can turn the rest off.

A bot that is only a member of the channel cannot post. Papera checks this at connect time and refuses rather than letting the first scheduled post fail.

3. Connect it in Papera

1. In Papera, open Settings → Social accounts and choose Connect → Telegram.
2. Enter the channel — its @username, or its numeric id if the channel is private (see below).
3. Paste the bot token from BotFather.
4. Choose Connect.

Papera verifies the token, resolves the channel, and confirms the bot may post there before saving anything. The connected channel then appears with its title and picture.

Finding a private channel's id. A private channel has no @username. Forward any message from it to @userinfobot, which replies with the channel's id — a negative number like -1001234567890. Paste that as the channel.

Connected accounts are global to your Papera account: connect once here, then add the channel to any workflow on its flow canvas.

4. Publish a post to the channel

Publishing is modeled on the flow canvas, not a single button:

1. On a workflow's canvas, add a social post node and write the post.
2. Add your connected Telegram channel to the canvas as an account node.
3. Link the post to the account node (a post can fan out to several accounts, on different platforms, at once).
4. Add a publish trigger and fire it — or use Post now / Schedule directly in the post editor.

Telegram messages are limited to 4,096 characters, and an album holds up to 10 images. A post with images whose text runs past 1,024 characters is sent as two messages — the album first, then the text — because that is Telegram's own limit on a caption attached to media. The editor's preview shows this split before you publish.

Troubleshooting

• "The bot isn't an administrator of that channel with permission to post." — Add the bot as an administrator of the channel with Post messages enabled (step 2), then connect again.
• "Telegram rejected the bot token. Reconnect the channel and retry." — The token was revoked or regenerated in BotFather. Create a fresh one with /token, then Reconnect the channel in Settings → Social accounts.
• "The bot can no longer post to this channel." — The bot was removed from the channel's administrators, or its Post messages right was turned off.
• Connect fails on the channel — check the @username spelling, or use the numeric id for a private channel. The bot must already be an admin: it cannot see a channel it hasn't been added to.
• "A Telegram send was interrupted and may already have posted." — A publish was cut off at the moment it was sending, and Telegram offers no way to ask whether the message landed. Check the channel: if the post isn't there, publish again.
• "An image is too long and narrow for Telegram." — Telegram refuses photos whose sides are more than 20:1. Crop the image before adding it; Papera won't crop it for you.