A Telegram Channel You Only Need to Watch Doesn't Have to Stay in Your Subscriptions

Some channels you don’t read, you just keep an eye on them. The hosting provider that runs your server announces scheduled maintenance and outages in its channel, and it writes only in Chinese. A conference you plan to attend posts its program and schedule changes. Nobody reads channels like these for pleasure, but missing the one post that matters is annoying.

People usually follow them in one of two ways: they subscribe, or they drop in to check from time to time.

What’s inconvenient about subscribing and checking manually

A subscription turns the channel into one more chat in your general list. It sits next to the channels you open every day and adds its own unread counter. You can mute it and move it to the archive, but then the channel drops out of sight, and you’re back to checking it manually, from memory.

Checking manually works without a subscription. A public channel can be found through Telegram search (channels FAQ), and its content is visible even in a browser, without an account: for example, at an address like t.me/s/channel_name (Telegram, channels tour). But now remembering to check is on you. If you check often, there’s usually nothing new and the visit is wasted. If you check rarely, the post you need may come out a day before you remember.

For a channel you only need to watch, it’s more convenient when new posts arrive in one place on their own and each one shows whether it’s worth opening.

How to follow a channel without subscribing

That’s how «Essence» Bot works. You add a public channel by its username, for example @channel_name, or by a link to it. You don’t need to subscribe to the channel: the bot reads it. You don’t need to connect your Telegram account either, you just message the bot.

New posts from the channel arrive in your personal chat with the bot in near real time. The bot doesn’t promise an exact delay, so don’t count on delivery the same second. Each message shows the channel name, and a link opens the original. If you follow several channels this way, posts from all of them arrive in the same chat.

Right after you add a channel, you may get the latest post the bot has already saved for it. After that, only new ones arrive.

Summary or original text

For each channel, you can choose how its posts arrive: as a short summary or as the original text.

A summary fits when posts are long or written in a language you don’t know, and you need to understand one thing: whether the news affects you. The summary arrives in the language you choose, so the hosting provider’s Chinese channel becomes readable. The summary shows whether it’s about maintenance in your region or a new plan you don’t need. If a post concerns your server, open the original and check the maintenance time: the numbers are clear even without knowing the language.

The original text fits when posts are short and in a language you understand, and the exact wording matters. If a conference moves a talk, you need the new time and the room, and a summary may miss one of the two. The original text arrives in the channel’s language, without translation, so for the Chinese hosting provider this option won’t work. Images, video and audio arrive according to your media settings. If the text doesn’t fit into one Telegram message, you’ll get a short card with a link to the post instead.

Filter and pause

If you only need posts with certain words from a channel, set the “Only with words” filter for it. It looks for whole words in the original text, so different forms of a word are caught with an asterisk at the end: move* will find “move” and “moved”, but not “moving”. The filter doesn’t understand what a post means, so it’s better to pick words with some margin. For the Chinese hosting provider’s channel, English words won’t find anything: the filter checks the original text, not the summary.

If the conference is over and the next one is six months away, you can pause delivery from its channel. The channel will stay in your list of sources with the chosen format and will keep taking up a slot in your source limit. When you turn delivery back on, only posts published after that will arrive, without a backlog. If you won’t need the channel at all, delete it.

When to open the original

A summary helps you decide whether you need a post, but it doesn’t replace it. It’s worth opening the original if you need to decide or do something based on the post and everything depends on the details: amounts, dates, conditions. People also open it to look at a mentioned document or attachment themselves and to reply in the comments: you can’t do that from the chat with the bot.

In other cases the summary is enough, and a post that doesn’t concern you can stay unopened. Unread items then pile up in one chat with the bot, not in a separate counter for each channel.

Where this kind of watching has limits

• Without a subscription, you can only follow public channels this way. A private channel that people join by invitation is read by the bot through your own Telegram account: the account must have access to the channel, and you allow processing of that channel separately.
• Groups can’t be followed this way. If you’re a group admin, there are “Chat digests” for it: at your request, the bot sends an overview of discussions for the period you choose.
• Only new posts arrive. Posts that came out before you added the channel can’t be viewed through the bot: open the channel itself for that.
• The bot doesn’t guarantee that every message will arrive. If a missed post means a direct loss for you, for example a channel that hands out orders on a first-come basis, keep the subscription with notifications on.
• A summary you’ve received stays in the chat even if the author later deletes or edits the post. But it’s not an archive of the channel: deleted posts won’t be restored, and the author’s edits won’t appear in the summary.

For the rest of these channels, you don’t need a subscription. Add one of them to «Essence» Bot, choose a summary or the original text for it, and see how many times a week you actually need to open the original.