In December 2022, Telegram gave administrators of groups with 200+ members the ability to enable an Aggressive Anti-Spam filter in these groups. In this article, we explain how it works and how to be careful when deciding to enable it.
1. What is the purpose of Aggressive Anti-Spam filter?
According to the idea of Telegram developers, the filter automatically monitors messages sent to the group. If a message seems suspicious to the filter, it deletes the message and punishes its author.
2. How to enable Aggressive Anti-Spam in a group?
- Make sure the group has 200 or more members.
- Open the group settings screen, go to the «Administrators» section and enable the «Aggressive Anti-Spam» option.
The anti-spam filter has no additional settings: it is either on or off.
3. How does the Anti-Spam filter work?
The anti-spam filter automatically analyzes messages sent by group members. It does not react to any events other than sending messages: neither to members joining, nor to reactions to messages, nor to anything else.
If the filter considers a message to be spam, it always performs two actions:
- Deletes the message from the group that it considers to be spam.
- Gives the author of this message a special type of spamban: see the article «Spamban«, section 4.3.
4. What’s the problem?
The inconvenience of using the anti-spam filter consists of three factors:
- Errors. Sometimes the filter allows false positives, that is, it considers messages that are not actually spam to be spam. Our subscribers report that they have encountered situations when the anti-spam filter considered
- A message that contained only a link to another message in the same group to be spam.
- A message that contained harmless text and a link to the official website telegram.org.
- Silence. When the filter is triggered, a record of the action performed by the official bot @tgsantispambot appears in the group’s «Recent actions». By clicking on this record, the administrator can report a false positive of the filter or ban the user. However, this can only be done within 48 hours after the filter was triggered. At the same time, Telegram does not send administrators any special notifications that the filter was triggered. And the user whose message the system reacted to is deprived of both the opportunity to send new messages to the group and the opportunity to contact the group administrators in private messages, because he is now spambanned.
- Unpredictability. An ordinary user of the group has no way of knowing whether the anti-spam filter is enabled in it: this setting is visible only to administrators. When joining a new group, the user always faces the risk that the anti-spam filter is enabled in it and that any message from him can trigger this filter. If this happens, the user can only hope that the administrators will see this in Recent Actions and mark the filter action as erroneous. By the way, this does not always help: sometimes, in order for Telegram to cancel the spamban of a user, you need to not only mark the filter action as erroneous, but also completely disable the filter in the group where it was triggered.
5. @tginfo advices
For group administrators
The Aggressive Anti-Spam is an experimental feature that often triggers incorrectly. If you actively moderate your group and don’t need help in combating spam, it’s better to disable this feature.
If you want to test this feature in your chat, make it a rule to check the «Recent Activity» section as often as possible to promptly mark false positives. Remember: a user who has received a spamban will not be able to write to you about it either in the group or in a private message.
For users
When sending messages to groups, remember that the anti-spam filter may be enabled in it, and be prepared that in this case, a spam ban may arrive completely unexpectedly and without good reason.
When joining a new group, it makes sense to first check with the administrators whether they use an Aggressive Anti-Spam in it. If they do, be careful when sending messages, and even better, show them this article.