Telegram

Telegram
URL	http://telegram.org
Status	Online!
Archiving status	In progress...
Archiving type	DPoS
Project source	telegram-grab, telegram-items
Project tracker	telegram
IRC channel	#telegrab (on hackint)
Data[how to use]	archiveteam_telegram

Telegram is a mostly open source chat system (web and app-based) which acts as a social network due to features like group chats and channels, originally intended as a drop-in replacement for WhatsApp.

Like Facebook pages/groups and Twitter, Telegram chats can contain a significant amount of history (text, audio/video and images) of various online communities, as well as personal digital history.

Structure

Channels on Telegram are essentially public streams of posts, similar to Twitter or RSS.

Since 2019-06-01 (update blog post), it is possible to "preview" channels on the web (e.g. @Telegram at [1] or [2]).

How to help if you have lists of URLs

For other ArchiveTeam projects that can use this kind of help, see Projects requiring URL lists.

This project requires lists of URLs for content on the target website. If you have a source of URLs, please:

1. Use the PCRE regular expression (telegram\.me|//([^/]*\.)?t\.me)(:\d+)?/(?!share/)\S+ for filtering.
   • Note that this regex is intentionally broad to cover many different URL formats. Please do not try to use a more narrow pattern, as it may miss valid URLs. We can always filter or transform the results as needed later.
   • Enable case-insensitive matching (e.g. grep's -i) to catch URLs with capitalization.
   • If using grep or similar, enable text matching (-a or --text) to catch URLs in files with apparent binary data.
   • Example command (GNU grep): grep -Pahoi '(telegram\.me|//([^/]*\.)?t\.me)(:\d+)?/(?!share/)\S+' FILENAME FILENAME...
2. If the output exceeds a few megabytes, compress it, preferably using zstd -10.
3. Give the file a descriptive name and upload it to https://transfer.archivete.am/.
4. Share the resulting URL in the project IRC channel.
   • If you wish your list to remain private, please get in touch with a channel op (e.g. arkiver or JustAnotherArchivist). Items generated from your list will still be processed publicly, but they will be mixed in with all other items and channel logs will not associate them with you.

Export methods

Web data only

These tools archive Telegram channels through their web view. Only public channels can be saved this way, and certain attachments (including PDFs and some very long videos) are not available.

ArchiveTeam's telegram project archives as WARC, supporting all available web data (and including outlinks). Suggestions are welcome! A bot in the project IRC channel accepts archival requests for eventual upload into the Wayback Machine; it understands the following commands:

• !help prints a help message listing available commands.
• !a archives Telegram data once.
  • !a <url> archives the given t.me url (autodetecting the page type).
  • !a channel:<channel name> archives the given channel.
  • !a post:<channel name>:<post id> archives the given post, including any discussions.
• !p archives a Telegram channel once immediately, then queues it for periodic re-archiving. (This is preferred for active, significant channels.)
  • !p <channel> <interval> <time-to-live> archives the given channel (as <url> or channel:<name>) once every interval seconds for the next time-to-live seconds (optional, default 1 year).
• !pget, !prenew, or !pdelete <channel> gets info for, renews, or deletes a periodic item, respectively.
• !pdump dumps info for all periodic items.

snscrape exports textual channel data as JSONL (media support is pending).

Deprecated

• Chromebot was once used, but has been shut down due to data integrity issues. (Old jobs can be found via this wiki.)
• ArchiveBot was once used, but due to its lack of Javascript support, its results are inferior to those of the special-purpose Telegram project. Use the Telegram bot instead. (Old jobs can be found via the viewer.)

All data

• The official Telegram Desktop app exports as HTML or JSON.
• telegram-export (no longer maintained)
• telegram-history-dump (no longer maintained); introduction
• Pidgin sync

See also Bellingcat's guide.

See also

• etherpad of third-party channel lists
• ArchiveBot/Telegram (some sites related to Telegram)