Question 58319 in Telegram API Question posted in
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Users banned by my Telegram bot do not stay banned? – Telegram API

TL;DR: Methods listed in "Attempts" are not working as they should. Whenever I run those Python methods, they end up only kicking the user (or maybe banning them for at maximum 2-3 minutes), regardless if I include until_date or not. All group permissions are enabled and in BotFather both group privacy mode and "allow groups?" are disabled.

I am new to Stack Overflow, so I’m not sure if the formatting of my question is fine and if a lengthy description is preferable.

Context: I have a (private) Telegram group with a little bit over 700 users. There are two other admins and five bots (Rose, Group Help, Combot and two that I coded). In the past couple of weeks I have been facing issues with banning users through my own bot, while Rose and Group Help bots seem to be able to.

Issue: My bot limits the amount of entries (per user) to the group to avoid people lurking, or just raiding the group when I share an invitation link. Group help bot and Rose kick people out if they don’t solve the captcha and present themselves in the first 5 minutes upon entering. I keep Combot to avoid letting known spammers in my group. The problem I’m facing is that whenever the ban is issued by my own bot, the user will simply be kicked out. I tried various methods to ban a user in my Python script, but nothing worked. I tried switching from python-telegram-bot to AIOgram, but it still doesn’t work. I am not sure if it’s caused by a conflict between bots (which wouldn’t make much sense), wrong methods, or if it’s a group/account-related problem. I tried my bot in a "test group" and it worked fine.

Screenshot of an example of the anomaly from the group logs channel: Since I can’t embed pictures yet, here is the imgur link.

Part of the current (pseudo)code using AIOgram:

@dp.message_handler(content_types=["new_chat_members"])
async def newUser(message: types.Message):
    for user in message.new_chat_members:
        con = psycopg2.connect(...)
        #[...SQL query fetching number of entries of a user...]

        if "DB is empty":
            #..Initialize..

        else:
            cur.execute(sql_script) #cur is the cursor
            #Returns a list with at most one tuple, where the first instance is the number of entries
            entries_list = cur.fetchall()

            if len(entries_list) == 0 or None:
                #Adds user to a table in Heroku DB and initializes entry = 1
                insertUser(tablename, userid, 1)
                await bot.send_message(channel_id, log_message)
                con.close()
            
            elif entries_list[0][0] < 2:
                updateUserEntries(tablename, entries_list[0][0] + 1, userid)
                await bot.send_message(channel_id, log_message)
                con.close()

            else: #Ban on third entry
                await chat.kick(userid, until_date = datetime.now() + timedelta(hours = 6))
                await bot.send_message(chat.id, ban_message)
                await bot.send_message(channel_id, log_message)
                #Removes user from the table (i.e. resets the entry count)
                removeUser(tablename, userid)
                con.close()

Attempts: The methods I tried using to ban users with are:

  • update.effective_chat.ban_member(chat_id, user_id) (python-telegram-bot),
  • bot.kick_chat_member(chat_id, user_id) (python-telegram-bot),
  • bot.ban_chat_member(chat_id, user_id) (python-telegram-bot – which suggested me to use kick_chat_member instead) and
  • message.chat.kick(user_id) (aiogram – where message is passed whenever a new user joins the group through Dispatcher.message_handler(content_types='new_chat_members')).

I originally only wanted to temporarily ban the users, so there should be an extra until_date parameter too. But I also tried permanently banning them, which according to the documentation any time less than 30 seconds or more than 366 days counts as a permanent ban. Nothing worked. (By the way, the script in general works and runs great. I am not sharing the full script because I am not comfortable with it being public, and the problem also does not pertain to the whole script anyways.)

Further details: My bot has all group permissions enabled except for adding admins and "remain anonymous". In BotFather it has both group privacy mode and "allow groups?" disabled (because I only use it for my group). At the moment the library I’m using for the bot (in Python) is AIOgram. Previously, it was all written using python-telegram-bot. I am using it in conjunction with psycopg2 to store user data in Heroku’s database. At one point I even tried creating a "ban table" in my database, but it still failed to keep the users out since the ban didn’t actually ban people. The ban actually only acts as a "kick".

I was thinking about setting up a webhook, but I am not familiar with Flask or Django, and webhooks in general. So that might take me some time. However, I’m not sure it would make a difference since it should not differ much, except maybe speed and memory wise.

I am not sure what I’m doing wrong. I tried to solve the problem in every way that I am capable of (considering that I am pretty new to Telegram API and Telegram python libraries, especially AIOgram).

If anyone has any ideas on how I can go about solving this issue, I would really appreciate it!

(Sidenote: I contacted Telegram support more than a week ago, but I haven’t received any response.)

Tags:

2

Answers


  1. Chosen as BEST ANSWER
    0

    Thank you, @CallMeStag for your remarks! I ended up "solving" the problem as I describe below. Although, I am still not sure why this worked but using any of the methods I listed in the question didn't.

    Disclaimer: This is not an efficient way to approach the issue, and I do not guarantee it will work. I also don't have a high traffic of people joining the group, so these solutions might not work for you.

    Partial (non-)solutions: I think there is a "phantom issue" between my bot and Telegram. Somehow Telegram (or Python, I'm not sure) doesn't understand the "kick" methods as "ban", whether I include until_date or not. (Also, Telegram support is non-existent). So, I thought of three (or four) alternative ways to ban someone without having to actually ban them:

    • Solution 1: Create a table in your database that will contain all the users that you will eventually ban. For your "ban" function, include a message handler that listens for new chat members. Whenever a new user joins (use new_chat_members to catch the event), make it run through all the entries in the table you created (e.g. you could use SELECT COUNT(*) FROM {BANTABLENAME} WHERE USERID = {USERID}) so that it will tell you if the user is banned. If the query returns a value greater than 0, you can just make an IF statement and kick the user out. (You can obviously make it a bit more complicated by manually adding an until_date). The downside is that it can fail to keep a user out since there is a bit of latency/delay when you run SQL queries.
    • Solution 2: This solution still requires that you create a table of banned users in your database. But instead of letting people join your group directly, direct them to your bot's chat first. Add a command handler for "/start". Whenever a user starts the bot, make it run through the table entries and depending on the result, the bot will either reply with the group link or a message informing them that they can't join (or nothing).
    • Solution 3: Set up a webhook. I don't know how to do it yet, so you should look it up on the internet. It will require you to learn at least Flask, or Django. This is definitely a nicer solution compared to the other ones. Usually, this "ban problem" does not pertain to whether you're using a webhook or not (like CallMeStag said). But compared to my next proposal (which works somehow), this is definitely a better practice.
    • Solution 4 (Verified): I was curious and wanted a more direct solution, so I decided I would just try manually making requests through www.api.telegram.org/bot<TOKEN>/METHOD?PARAMETERS using GET and POST HTTPS methods in Python. This is definitely not an ideal solution if you have a high traffic of users. Because you might get errors due to too many requests. Also, depending on what you're trying to do, it might be too slow. So definitely use webhooks instead. In my case, I only need to POST the ban using the banChatMember method, which also happens with a pretty low frequency. So I should not encounter problems. (I will update if I do).

    Further doubts: I am not sure why solution 4 works, but directly banning with python-telegram-bot or AIOgram doesn't. I did not try Telethon or Pyrogram. They should be similar, but they also allow you to log-in as a user (i.e. it will start a session of your account through the bot), which could potentially work.

    Update: It doesn't work. Banned users still don't get banned. It only works when I manually do it for some reason. The whole thing really doesn't make any sense. It's like it doesn't work while polling, but it works if I manually send out www.api.telegram.org/bot<token>/banChatMember?chat_id=<chatid>&user_id=<userid>.


  2. 0

    It’s not obvious to me what goes wrong here, but I have a few hints/remarks:

    • which library you use to make the api request should be irrelevant. you can even make the request manually via the browser/curl/whatever if you like to
    • webhooks have nothing to do with this – how you fetch updates is indpendent of making requests to the api
    • python-telegram-bot interprets timezone-naive datetimes as UTC – that may have an effect how you pass the until_date

    Dislaimer: I’m currently the maintainer of python-telegram-bot.

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