GladOS: Channel Protection Bot

Is your channel growing while reach falls? Often the cause is dead and inflated subscribers, who ruin statistics and scare off advertisers. GladOS is for admins who want to clean up their audience and defend against new attacks. 🛡️

The bot describes itself as a tool for protecting, cleaning and analyzing channels and groups.

What GladOS does, according to its author

• Fast fake removal. The developer claims about 10,000 subscribers are removed in roughly 8 minutes.
• Protection from boosting. The bot looks for spikes in joins that resemble an attack and blocks them.
• Captcha. Newcomers must prove they are human.
• Auto-approval of requests. If the channel uses join requests, the bot accepts verified users by itself.
• Filtering of new members. Suspicious accounts are screened out at the door.

You start the bot with /start, then connect it to your channel or chat as an administrator.

Where fake subscribers come from

Sometimes the owner buys them for a bigger number in the header. More often competitors or boosting services attack a channel: hundreds of bots join at once.

The harm is real. The ratio of views to subscribers drops, ads pay back worse, and recommendation algorithms see weak engagement. 📉

Setting up protection: the order of steps

1. Open the bot and press /start.
2. Add it to your channel or group as an administrator.
3. Grant permissions. Blocking needs the right to restrict members, and approving requests needs the right to add members.
4. Enable captcha and new-user filtering.
5. Run the cleaning and check the result in the statistics.

Give exactly the permissions needed. Extra powers raise the risk if anything happens to the bot.

What captcha does not solve

A simple captcha stops primitive scripts but not every attack. Boosters sometimes use aged accounts with real phone numbers, and a button check is no obstacle for them.

That is why protection works best as a set: captcha, filtering, join requests and regular review of growth stats. If you see a sharp jump at night, that is a reason to switch on a stricter mode. 🔍

Be careful when cleaning

Mass removal is irreversible. If filters are too harsh and catch real people, getting them back is hard, so first look at exactly whom the bot plans to remove.

Do not use the bot for dubious aims, such as boosting or pressuring other admins. Learn the settings on a test group first.

Who needs it

Owners of channels with advertising, where honest numbers matter. Admins of big chats attacked by spammers. People who bought an old channel and want to check its audience.

If you run a small private chat, the built-in Telegram settings are enough.