Connect your Telegram group
Create your own Telegram bot, add it to your group as an admin, and let paying members join automatically — plus how to fix a bot that has stopped working.
Insy gates your Telegram group with a bot: the doorkeeper that lets in people with active access and removes people whose access has ended. Setup is a one-time job with a few careful steps.
Step 1 — Create a bot and get its token
Open @BotFather in Telegram
Search for @BotFather (the official one, with the blue check) and start a chat.
Create a new bot
Send /newbot and follow the prompts to name it and give it a username. BotFather then sends a
token — a long string like 1234567890:ABCdef.... That’s the bot’s password. Keep it
private.
Paste the token into Insy
On your community’s Telegram screen, paste the token and save. Insy checks it’s a real, working token before accepting — an invalid or mistyped one is rejected right away.
Step 2 — Add the bot to your group as an admin
Once the token is accepted, Insy gives you a link that opens Telegram and walks you through adding the bot. Use that link rather than adding the bot by hand — it carries the settings the bot needs.
Open the link and pick your group
The link lets you choose which group to add the bot to. Pick the private group you want to gate.
Grant it admin rights
The bot must be an administrator with permission to add users and to remove/restrict members — exactly what it needs to invite paying members and remove those who lapse. The link requests these two; don’t strip them afterwards.
Wait for the confirmation
Once the bot lands in the group with the right rights, Insy detects it automatically and posts a short confirmation in the group. From that point the group is connected.
Checking the connection
Your community’s Telegram screen shows the current state: whether a token is saved, whether a group has been detected, its title, and whether the connection is healthy. If anything is off, you’ll see it there first.
How members get in
Members never need an invite from you personally — the bot handles it:
- After paying, a member receives their own private, single-use invite link. Opening it sends a join request, and the bot approves it because their access is active. Links expire, so they’re meant to be used promptly.
- Any time, a member can message the bot with
/invitefor a fresh link — useful if the first expired or they joined on another device. With no active access, the bot tells them so instead of letting them in. - Members can check their own standing with
/me,/statusor/membership— whether access is active and until when.
Because entry runs through join requests the bot approves, someone without an active membership can’t get in even if they obtain a link — the bot declines them.
Fixing a broken or disconnected bot
If members suddenly can’t join, or the connection shows as unhealthy, the cause is almost always that the bot was removed from the group or lost its admin rights. Work through these in order:
Confirm the bot is still in the group, as an admin
Open the group’s member list. The bot should be there, marked as administrator, still holding the add-users and remove-members permissions. If it was kicked or demoted, that’s the problem.
Re-add or re-promote it
From the Telegram screen, use the reconnect link to add the bot back to the same group (or re-grant its admin rights if it’s still a member). Re-adding it to the original group restores the existing connection — no need to start from scratch.
Re-register the bot if needed
If the bot is present and an admin but still not reacting, the screen offers a re-register action that re-establishes the Telegram–Insy link. Run it, then test with a member.