Telegram Commands

Telegram Bots have a special version of a persistent menu called commands. Commands allow your users to trigger specific stories from your bot.

/start command

When a user clicks into the your bot on Telegram for the first time, they are presented with the bot's description and a START button.

Clicking the START button is equivalent to typing /start to your bot. Therefore, when your user clicks the Start button, the first message they will see that got sent to the bot was the /start command itself like this

Therefore, /start is a default command in every BotDistrikt bot. When the TELEGRAM group of rules is created after linking your bot to Telegram, you will also see a rule automatically generated like this

This rule just checks if a sent a User sent a message with the text /start to the bot, and if so, triggers the bot's default greeting story.

Custom commands

Telegram bots are known well to work with slash commands like /start. On BotDistrikt, you may add your own commands and descriptions. Here is an example of how it can be used

The platform then identifies the Linked Story, based on which rule is selected as the Passing Rule for each command.

A good practice is to create a New Rule for each command in the generated TELEGRAM group, and the story you want to trigger for it like this

From the example above, we create a new rule for each of the /about, /settings, and /feedback commands.