28.11.2021
What I figured out about etiquette for telegram bots
I wrote my first telegram bot and caught all sorts of tiny nuances about how these hunks of metal are supposed to talk to people so as not to piss them off.
0) If you're going to write a bot, I really recommend keeping one eye on the nice bots that already exist and copying their communication tricks. My idols are Pasha Kozlov's bot @pashakozlov_bot and the No Flame No Game mentors' bot @Nfng_bot
1) Say hi to a new user. By default a new user will see nothing in the bot. Fill in the description (what's visible in the bot's profile) and the first message with instructions on how to start chatting. For telegram bots these are the "edit about" and "edit description" settings in @botFather
2) Never delete messages from the bot. It gives the user a feeling of being gaslit, don't do that.
3) Help people not get lost in space. Tell them they can always press /start and begin again. Make a /help command with a list of the main commands. Register the main commands in the bot's settings with clear descriptions (tg will prompt them). Name the commands simply and informatively. In error messages, explain what to do and where to run for help.
4) Plan B: find a human. In the start message, /help, error messages, and before complicated branches of the dialogue, tell people how to reach live humans if something goes wrong.
5) Think about what to do with buttons. Buttons inside a message are handier than commands, but tg doesn't show which button the user tapped, and then it's hard to figure out what the conversation was about (although the user doesn't always need to figure it out). There are two options: start the next message with a note "you chose button A" (easy to put together, but you won't be able to funnel into a single command from different places), or edit the previous message: remove the buttons and add at the end of the text which button was clicked "👉button A". I like the second one better.
Tell me, which bots do you use yourselves? I have exactly three: the random coffee bots, the nfng bot, and the bot for this channel, for inserting buttons with a brontosaurus and broccoli.