CatLounge

Fork of secretlounge-ng, a bot to make an anonymous group chat on Telegram.

Changes

You can find a general list of modifications in our sequencially-updated changelog document. This however only includes a selection of the most fundamental changes without much detail. Please see our commit history for more detailed information on what has been changed.

From within the bot, you can access a prettified version of the changelog file with the /changelog command. It lists the changes of the past three releases by default.

Setup

Requirements

Make sure you match the system requirements to use this bot framework:

• Linux or Windows* operating system
• Python 3 with PIP
• Bot token from BotFather

*) Windows OS support is still in beta. It should generally work as long as tripcodes are not used.

Linux setup

1. Enter the following commands to set up the bot environent:

   $ pip3 install -r requirements.txt
   $ cp config.yaml.example config.yaml

   If the first command fails, you may have to manually install the Python modules listed in requirements.txt.
2. Edit config.yaml with your favorite text editor
3. Enter the following command to start the bot:

   $ python ./secretlounge-ng

   Note that on some systems you need to type python3 instead of python

Windows setup

1. Enter the following commands to set up the bot environent:

   > pip3 install -r requirements.txt
   > copy config.yaml.example config.yaml

   If the first command fails, you may have to manually install the Python modules listed in requirements.txt.
2. Edit config.yaml with your favorite text editor
3. Enter the following command to start the bot:

   > python secretlounge-ng

   Note that on some systems you need to type python3 instead of python or use the absolute path if you have not updated your PATH system variable

BotFather setup

Message @BotFather to configure your bot as follows:

• /setprivacy: enabled
• /setjoingroups: disabled

Commands list

If you want, you can also set the command list with BotFather, by using: /setcommands <COMMANDS>. We recommend using the list below, but you can customize them the way you want, of course:

start - Join the chat
stop - Leave the chat
help - Show all available commands
info - Get info about your account
ks - Sign with your karma level
users - Show current user count
remove - Delete a message [mod]

Please keep in mind that if you decided to enable karma_is_pats in the configurations, you may want to change the ks into ps here.

Our bot also supports a commands setup with /setup_commands. This allows you to set up the commands list from within the bot if you have not already defined any commands. If you need to modify your commands list, please use either BotFather's /setcommands or your bot's /commands command; both work nearly identical.

Starting the bot

Once the bot is running, you can use a telegram client to connect to your bot. The first person that connects automatically becomes an admin. Thereby, it is important that you do not publish the bot URL before first entering it. If you are the first one to join, you should get a nottification message confirming you have been made an automatic admin. Additional admins and mods may be promoted using the /admin and /mod commands. We recommend defining a welcome message with rules, too, using /rules <TEXT>.

Contact

You can contact us at any time via our support bot. If you find something missing or if you encounter bugs, please open an issue.