Native comments for Telegram channels

Yesterday Telegram made significant platform updates including "Search Filters, Anonymous Admins, Channel Comments and More", you can check them all out here.  

Let's look more closely at native Telegram Channel comments and how they work. 

I've set them up on my social media tips channel "SocialKnowhow". After setup new posts have "Leave a comment" appended. Clicking on leave a comment within the app opens up a chat thread with the post pinned at the top: this thread hosts comments for that channel post.

These post threads are hosted in a connected discussion group. 

So adding native commenting to a public Telegram channel involves connecting the channel to a group, which hosts the threads. 

To add a discussion group to a channel edit the channel and link a group, you can link an existing related chat or super easily create a new one. I created a new group.

 

This is where things get really clever.

As your discussion place is a group, you have control over the permissions for that group. So you can control whether people can add media to comments, whether they can send stickers etc etc ... 

You can also control the speed at which people can comment. 

Ban or reduce permissions of people who join the discussion group.

Note: people who comment on a channel post without joining the discussion group would have default group permissions. 

All this control over "comments" is really excellent. 

Admin settings.

Again, as the commenting "space" is a group you can make any group member into an admin, with permissions of your choosing, to help manage the commenting space for large channels this is awesome. 

This is also how anonymous group admins works. Toggling the send anonymously switch mean comments by that admin will either use the group name, with any custom title you assign, or the admins account name. That's great, both for admins who wish to remain anonymous, but also differentiating between multiple anonymous admins with custom titles. 

Again, excellent. 

So how do you feel now about native channel comments?

Follow @qwallis