The Teloscope Telegram Bot: A Guide for Beginners
What is The Teloscope Bot?
The Teloscope Bot is a third-party application that runs inside the messaging app Telegram. Users can interact with The Teloscope Bot by sending messages and commands to it by opening a chat with it.
Here is a list of the bot’s main features:
- Use the bot in your own language: 12 major languages available.
- Get information about Telos accounts: display stats about CPU, NET, and RAM resources, total balance, votes cast and inclusion in snapshots.
- Monitor accounts, premium names and contracts: subscribe to real-time notifications and set a threshold to filter out irrelevant Tx.
- Check TLOS exchange rate in EOS and US dollar, or use the TLOS to USD converter.
- Monitor TLOS price volatility: receive free alerts as soon as TLOS price crosses certain values.
- Know current RAM price on Telos Mainnet in TLOS/KB
- Create a new Telos account for free.
How to use it
You can access the Telos version of The Teloscope Bot at https://t.me/TeloscopeBot
It might be of your interest to know that there is a similar version of the bot for the EOS blockchain network. You can find it here.
Once you’re chatting with the bot type /start or press Start to begin.
The bot will ask you the “What do you want to do?” question. Now you can press Subscriptions, Any Account Info, Converter, Free Telos Account, Settings, Help or type the common slash (/) to bring up the list of commands.
The commands are pretty self-explanatory:
- /help — returns a help message.
- /start — begins interaction with the user. This command gives you access to the subscription service and information about any account in Telos.
- /freetelosacct — creates a new Telos account for free. You just need to fill in the account name and the keys.
- /tlos_price — returns the real-time price of TLOS token for these trading pairs: TLOS/EOS and TLOS/USD.
- /ram_price_nm — returns the actual price in TLOS of 1 KB of RAM on Telos mainnet.
- /web — returns the URL of The Teloscope website.
Subscriptions
You can press Telos accounts, Bid names, Contracts or Price alert to select the type of subscription that you want to manage.
Accounts
You are allowed to subscribe up to a maximum of five different Telos accounts. Select Show subs for listing all your current subscriptions, New for adding a subscription, or Delete for removing it.
You will be notified whenever there are relevant actions from/to any of those accounts. Alerts are sent immediately.
By default, alert threshold is set to 0.1000 TLOS. You can change that value under Settings at the initial bot screen. Please read further below on the Transactions threshold section how to do it.
The current balance and specific links to Tx details on EOSX and TELOSTRACKER explorers are included in the information that is sent.
If you want to test that bot notifications are working you can proceed as follows: go to your preferred voting application (wallet or web) and submit your votes again.
Names
The Bid names option helps you follow the Telos premium names you want. You are allowed to subscribe up to a maximum of five different ones. You can even subscribe to names that include a dot (.) in them.
Premium names are part of a bidding process. Whenever an account places a bid for any of those names the bot will send you an alert including the bound bid information.
Contracts
The Contracts option lets you receive alerts whenever the code of a smart contract has been updated. You can subscribe to any Telos contract the same way you do with accounts and bidnames.
This may be useful not only for developers but for anyone who’s especially concerned with possible changes made to custom tokens etc.
Price alert
The Price alert option lets you create a tailored volatility threshold based on TLOS price behaviour.
The bot will first show you current price in USD for one TLOS. Just set upper and lower thresholds and the bot will send you a notification when the TLOS price crosses your thresholds. You can set one or both threshold values, and delete any of them.
Dates are displayed in UTC time-zone. Currently all price alert messages will be sent in English for any language except for Spanish.
The bot checks TLOS price every 10 minutes. But as long as you do not change thresholds, alert messages will be sent spaced apart 8 hours. This avoids you receiving too many repetitive price alert messages, specially when your threshold values were set very close to current price. Upon change of any of the price thresholds, that hour counter will be reset.
Any Account Info
This option gives you plenty of information about any Telos account. You just need to provide the name of the account you want the bot to query about.
Resources
Resources button gives you access to several types of information about the provided account. You can check stats about CPU, NET, RAM and Total balance, either individually or all together.
Votes
Votes button returns the list of voted BPs. If you are using a proxy the name of the proxy and its voted BPs are displayed.
Snapshots
This option lets you check if your account is included in any of the ‘official’ snapshots.
Converter
This option makes quick and easy convert TLOS to and from USD in real-time.
Free Telos Account
You can get a free Telos account, compliments of the Telos Foundation who has deposited funds for about 2 million free new user accounts. You just need to fill in the account name and the keys.
The account name must be 12 characters long, and can contain lowercase (a-z) and certain digits (1–5). In case of non availability of the name the bot will warn you.
For the public owner and active keys we recommend you copy-paste new ones created an offline key generator like EOS Key (the most secure method). Alternately you can generate your keys with a web based tool (quick but less secure).
And please back up all your keys and do not share your private key with anyone!
Settings
You can customize your settings to make the bot suit your needs and preferences.
Language
By default, the language of the bot interface and chat messages is English. But as the bot is multilingual you may also chat with it in your local language. You can easily change your interface language by pressing Language and selecting your preferred one.
Currently 12 major languages are available: Spanish, Turkish, Russian, Chinese, Indonesian, Hindi, German, French, Italian, Dutch, Arabic and English.
Network
By default, all the available options are executed on the Telos Mainnet. But you can change your default network to the Telos Testnet with this option.
Tx threshold
By default, the minimum transaction amount set in order to receive a bot alert is 0.1000 TLOS for all and each of your subscribed accounts. You can check the current value and change it. Just keep in mind that it is a global value, so you cannot set it on a per account basis.
Troubleshooting
If you’re about to raise an issue because you think you’ve found a problem with The Teloscope Bot… please read this first.
Please note that you must have a username in Telegram, not just a display name, in order for the bot to chat with you. So make sure you set one in the Telegram app settings.
If you are experiencing operational issues (freezing up, general slowness) with the bot, please type /start and check again.
If the problem still persists you can check Telegram Messenger twitter to see if there are any widespread connection issues. It doesn’t happen often but sometimes Telegram experiences difficulties that affect chatbots as well.
Keep in mind that The Teloscope bot is currently in public beta. This means that it is feature ready but might have bugs that can be found only when a wide user base tries it out. If you find any issue with the current version of the bot, please contact us.
Future development
We are always testing refinements that we include as soon as we can in regular updates of the bot. If you have a sound proposal of improvement, please contact us. And check our community channels for new announcements related with The Teloscope Bot.
Protect yourself from scammers
Naturally, any bot should be treated as a stranger. Bots are no different from human users that you meet in groups for example.
Beware of anyone impersonating either our bots or any of The Teloscope team members, even if they chat nicely! Just click on the photo/avatar of the bot/person you are talking to, to check their username and compare this with @TeloscopeBot or @TheTeloscope.
We will never chat with you about our bot from any other account. Moreover we will never ask you for passwords, private keys, Telegram codes or crypto/money.
Also, be careful when opening files sent by bots, same as you would deal with ordinary humans. Make sure the computers you use are free of spyware, malware, and virus infections. Always keep your operating system and the software on it up to date to protect you from security vulnerabilities.
This guide has been produced by members of The Teloscope team.
You can support us by including theteloscope among the list of BPs that deserve your vote.
