Group Butler and the new administration tools

With his latest version, Telegram introduced a lot of new built-in administration functions, and some of them replace some of the tools Group Butler offers.

This is a fast overview of what has been removed, what changed, and what has been added with today's update.

• overview of Telegram's "admin revolution" update
• what has been removed
• what has been added
• other annoucements

Quick overview of the new administration tools

So, Telegram completly renewed the administration system with a lof of cool additions, making admins' job easier by providing many tools that allow to set users and administrators permissions, along with an event log that lasts 48 hours.

A short description of the new tools:

• users permissions: it is now possible to choose wheter or not an user can: read messages (remove this permission = ban), send messages, send media (images, videos, documents, voice notes and video messages), send other types of medias (stickers, GIFs, use inline bots, send games), show the preview of the links. All these permissions can be revoked with a time limit too
• admins permissions: changing the group photo, pinning messages, deleting messages, generating/revoking his own invite link, changing the group description, promoting new administrators, restricting users (changing users' permissions) are all administration actions that can be limited
• events log: all the relevant events that take place in the group are now logged in the events log. These events include: people joining/leaving the group, messages edited/deleted, changes in users' permissions. The events are logged for a maximum of 48 hours

What has been removed

Now, will all these new tools, some of the Group Butler's functions had to be cut away, because no longer needed.

Here's the list:

• Moderators. All the moderators-related commands (that is, /promote, /demote, /modlist, /staff) from now on are disabled. Moderators promoted with /promote are now seen as normal users. You can now promote them as real admins and adjust their permissions. The dedicated section of the configuration menu has been removed aswell
• /block. All the /block-related commands has been removed. It is now possible to add to a group's blacklist users who aren't member of that group, so this command is not needed anymore. Just use /ban
• /tempban has been temporary disabled. Telegram offers now a much more accurate way to temporary ban an user. The command must be rewritten
• The antibot (again): since there is no safe way to tell wether an user is a bot or not, and making an harmful bot running on an user account has always been relatively easy, the antibot has been removed. If you're scared about what your members can add, please turn off the "anyone can add new members" option from your (Telegram's) group settings
• The goodbye message
• /about is themporary disabled

What has been added

The new update brings some interesting new methods that allows to enhance Group Butler's functions. Thanks to them, a few new tools has been added, along with other minor improvements to already existing functions.

The list:

• @admin's "address" inline button under reported messages [read more]
• configure the default permissions to be granted when new members join [read more]
• /fwdban, new command to block the original sender of a forwarded message
• /ban, /kick, /fwdban, /unban can be used just by the administrators who can restrict users' permissions (I know, /unban should be available to every admin. Will be fixed)
• /snap works again, and can now be used once every 12 hours
• /newpin command: sends a new message that will be considered the new message to be pinned, and thus edited when /pin is used
• #extra commands, if set to be sent in private for users and with silent mode turned off and the user who uses the command haven't started the bot yet, now ask the user to start the bot first. If silent mode is on, no message will be sent. Also, now /extra list returns the list of custom commands ordered alphabetically. Oh, and they are no longer case-sensitive now
• from the antispam settings, is now possible to choose between three statuses for the two available types of spam (t.me links and forwarded messages): allowed, warn the user, or delete the message [read more]
• from the antiflood settings, is now possible to mute the user when flood is detected (mute = revoke the permission to send messages)
• option to mute users when they receive the last warning (from the configuration menu)
• Turkish localization, thanks to M. Furkan

New button to mark a report as addressed

Now messages reported with @admin (or /report) are sent with a new button that lets the admins address the issue, so other admins will know when a received report has already (or is being) addressed without having to find it in the chat.

Side note: the @admin command tutorial hasn't been updated yet with this new option

Setting the default permissions for new members

As I said above several times, the new Telegram update brings the possibility to configure users' permissions.

The new "default permissions" section of the configuration menu allows to set the permissions that the new members who join the group will have.

Note that permissions aren't indipendent: if an user has the permission to send "other types of media", he must have the permissions to send messages and media. If the permission to send media or show link previews is enabled, the permission to send messages must be enabled too.

Important: only the admins allowed to restrict users' permissions can access this menu.

Option to delete messages forwarded from channels or containing Telegram links

This is a simple addition to the antispam settings: from now, it is possible to choose three different behaviour: allow, warn and then ban, and from now delete.

When you set one of the two items to "delete", the bot will not warn the user. Messages will just be deleted.

This function will be improved with the following updates.

Important: we all know how annoying it is when you waste a lot of time writing a long message and as soon as it is sent, it gets deleted by a bot because you accidentally inlcluded a link. Please use this function with caution.

Other announcements

> Persian group is back, find its link at @gbgroups

> Some guys have been working for the past weeks on a really really interesting fork of Group Butler with reliability and performance improvements.

Changes range from adding Docker and CI support, persisting data to Postgres, adding multi threading support and more. 

Due to the size of the changes and codebase, they would like to ask for volunteers to help them with this task.

Contributing: the code is available on their GitLab repository.

The pull request with each change throughly explained can be found here