Sean: A Utility Bot for Chats

Telegram sometimes calls for small things that are not worth a separate app: who the admins of a chat are, what a strange symbol is called, what service data hides inside a message. Sean packs such small things into one bot. 🤖

The profile calls it the "Major Bot" of an author named Sean and points to the developer's channel. It is not a service with big promises, just a set of working utilities.

Five commands, five small jobs

• /help. A hint on how to use the bot.
• /info. Message information: a technical summary the regular interface does not show.
• /lsadmin. The list of all chat administrators and their permissions.
• /uniname. The Unicode name of a character, for when you cannot tell which sign is in front of you.
• /factor. A number factoring query, judging by the command name.

The bot also works inline: type its name and a query in any chat, and the result appears right in the message field.

Why an admin list matters

When a chat has a dispute, a complaint or suspicious activity, the first question is who moderates here and what they may do. The admin list command answers that at once.

Group owners benefit too. Every few months it is worth walking through the list and removing people who went quiet or hold more rights than they need.

1. Open the chat and call the administrator list command.
2. Compare permissions. Inviting users, pinning, deleting messages, adding admins.
3. Trim the extras. Rights an admin does not need are better revoked.

Why character names are useful

Unicode holds a huge number of signs, and many look identical. A Latin letter and a similar Cyrillic one are different characters, and scammers exploit this to fake names and links.

The character name command helps tell lookalikes apart, find invisible spaces and work out where a strange box or glyph in the text came from. For programmers and web designers it saves time.

Message information

A message's service data matters when you are sorting out bots and chats: identifiers, content type, sender. The regular Telegram client shows none of it.

If you forward such data to others, remember it can contain user identifiers. Do not publish it where it does not belong.

Privacy and caution

When adding any bot to a working chat, ask why it needs administrator rights. Commands like the admin list or message info usually require no special permissions.

• Give nothing extra. Grant the minimum.
• Check the name. Bots with similar names are plentiful.
• Source code. The author has a page with the code of his Telegram bot, written in PHP, which helps if you want to see how it works.

Inline mode in practice

Inline is handy because the bot does not have to join the chat. You type its name in the message field, enter a query, pick a result and send it.

That makes it easy to check a symbol or a reference mid-conversation, without leaving the thread and without giving the bot access to the group.

The bot shows hints for inline queries itself; just open the list after typing its name.