Reacting and Replying to Telegram Stories

• While viewing someon’s story, you can react to it by clicking the heart icon, or by simply opening reply dialog and choosing a reaction.

• You can also tap and hold the heart icon to choose a different reaction without having to open the reply dialog.

• Notice that in however way you react, you will be added to a list of those who have viewed the story, even if you are in Stealth Mode.

More on this update can be found here.

⚒ The source code of Telegram for Android and iOS have been updated to 10.0

@Telegram #Android #iOS #source #reproducibleBuilds

Creating Stories

• Create stories using photos or videos either from your gallery or through the in-app camera.

• You can use combine multiple images from your gallery in one story: open the sticker panel in the editor and tap the photo icon in the bottom corner. There, you can also find and choose images from the internet.

Dual Camera Mode

• Photos and videos can be taken simultaneously from both front and back cameras, and switch between them even while recording.

• The recording from one camera fills the entire screen, while the other camera appears as a small circle that can be moved around even while recording.

• This feature is not available on all devices.

Media Editor

• Using the built-in media editor, you can attach stickers, GIFs, text, and location tags, and make adjustments to brightness, contrast, and saturation.

• When adding geotags, you can specify any point on the map or choose a suitable one from the list. The location you choose doesn't necessarily have to be the place you live or the place where the photo or video was taken.

Story Captions

• Stories have a separate text field where you can add a more detailed description.

• Text captions support @mentions and links, allowing you to tag your friends and share websites.

• The maximum length of the caption is 200 character for regular users, and 2048 characters for premium users.

More on this update can be found here.

Privacy Settings for Stories

• When posting a story, you can choose from four privacy settings: Everyone, My Contacts, Close Friends, and Selected Contacts.

• Each setting can be customized, allowing you to include or exclude individual users, or all members of specific groups.

• Additionally, you can create a list of users who will never see your story, regardless of the selected privacy settings.

• You can also disable screenshots so that the viewers won’t be able to screenshot your story on their devices or share it with others.

More on this update can be found here.

Editing Stories

• You can edit the privacy settings and pretty much any details of your story at any time: captions, text overlays, stickers, and other elements—all without the need of deleting your story and creating a new one.

• To edit a story, open the menu button, and choose “Edit Story.”

• While a story is up, you can change who can view it: open the privacy settings in the top right corner, and choose between the options: Everyone, My Contacts, Close Friends, or Selected Contacts.

• You can view your stories from Settings > My Stories. There you can tap on any story to see who viewed it, change its visibility, or remove it from your profile.

More on this update can be found here.

Detailed View Statistics

• You can see a list of those who have viewed your stories.

• You can open the list of viewers directly in the story or from the archive at Settings > My Stories.

• Filters allow you to see which contacts of yours viewed the story, and let you prioritize recent views or reactions.

• To see if a specific user has viewed your story, simply enter their name in the search bar.

• This list becomes inaccessible 24 hours after the story expires. Premium users have permanent access to it.

• Note that the reaction and view counts always remain accessible.

• Premium users can enable Stealth Mode to anonymously see stories of other users. This will remove them from the viewer list of stories posted 5 minutes before and 25 minutes after enabling Stealth Mode.

More on this update can be found here.

Bot API was updated to version 6.8

What's new:
• Added the field story to the class Message for messages with forwarded stories. Currently, it holds no information.
• Added the field voter_chat to the class PollAnswer, to contain channel chat voters in Polls. For backward compatibility, the field user in such objects will contain the user 136817688 (@Channel_Bot).
• Added the field emoji_status_expiration_date to the class Chat.
• Added the method unpinAllGeneralForumTopicMessages.
• Increased to 512 characters the maximum length of the startapp parameter in direct Web App links.

See the full changelog for details on the official website.

#update #BotAPI

That is not 100% certain, but there is a reason why none of the major social media platforms allow to save media content locally on the device.

They are trying to incentivize link sharing to drive additional views and potential followers for their content creators. So allowing to save content for everyone may have an adverse effect on people creating original content, as people would be just stealing their content and reposting as their own rather then linking it.

When limited only to small fraction of users (in this case, premium, similar to YouTube), saving other people’s content becomes less of an issue.

We decided to make formatting premium for now out of concern that promoters and spammers will start embedding links to advertise their referral links and Telegram will become a giant junk marketplace.

Telegram stories are a new genre not only because they are very visible right in the chat list, but also because they can be cross posted in the profile page grids. Active links in these places can become a spammer’s dream. Again, there is a reason why platforms like Instagram don’t allow clickable links in captions for posts.

Spam is a tricky animal: if you set the wrong incentives, it will be so commercially appealing so it will become next to impossible to stop it.

Having said that, other parts of formatting (bold, italic etc) in captions can easily become available for free. We just paywalled all formatting for now as it was easier to implement. However, the current limitation is easy to bypass, as anyone who wants to emphasize some text can simply add it on the media in the editor instead of using the caption.

Telegram Desktop updated to version 4.9.2

What's new:
— Remove single recently used emoji or reset the list from context menu.
— Change all emoji skin colors from Emoji & People section.
— Connected Websites section in Settings > Privacy and Security.
— Bug fixes and other minor improvements.

Download: from official website or GitHub.

#update #desktop

I am typing this message using Telegram for iPadOS. I have been actively using it since last year and haven’t encountered any issues with cache management so far.

Noted though.

I avoid the Apple “ecosystem” altogether and consider iCloud a surveillance tool + Samsung has had superior hardware for years.

But part of my job is to make sure Telegram works better than the competition on all platforms, so I have to use everything.

Story circles in group chats had to be removed after internal testing, because the ability to quickly open people’s profile pages was lost.

We decided to make formatting premium for now out of concern that promoters and spammers will start embedding links to advertise their referral links and Telegram will become a giant junk marketplace.

Telegram stories are a new genre not only because they are very visible right in the chat list, but also because they can be cross posted in the profile page grids. Active links in these places can become a spammer’s dream. Again, there is a reason why platforms like Instagram don’t allow clickable links in captions for posts.

Spam is a tricky animal: if you set the wrong incentives, it will be so commercially appealing so it will become next to impossible to stop it.

Having said that, other parts of formatting (bold, italic etc) in captions can easily become available for free. We just paywalled all formatting for now as it was easier to implement. However, the current limitation is easy to bypass, as anyone who wants to emphasize some text can simply add it on the media in the editor instead of using the caption.

Stories from Telegram

An increasing number of users are starting to see stories posted on behalf of Telegram. These stories visually showcase some of the story features from the messenger’s latest update.

Previously, we reported that the Telegram team intends to share information about app updates in a new format (in addition to the long-standing text updates in the messenger’s official account).

It isn’t possible to hide these stories from the main screen using the same method as hiding stories from contacts: the standard hiding method is not available in this case.

#Stories

Does The Ability to Post Stories Without Having Premium Subscription Depend on Your Region?

In the version 10.0.0 of Telegram's mobile applications, posting Stories became available even to accounts without a Telegram Premium subscription. However, many users have discovered that this feature hasn't appeared for them.

The editorial team at @tginfoen believes that the ability to post Stories for users without a premium subscription depends on the country's phone code linked to the Telegram account.

For instance, in Russia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, India and Iran, publishing Stories without Telegram Premium isn't possible, whereas users from Belarus and Kazakhstan are permitted to do so.

A detailed article about the editorial team's observations and story publication in other countries is available at the following link:
• tginfo.me/stories-by-countries.

#Stories

New Features on the Telegram Ads Platform

Over the past few weeks Telegram Ads (the official advertising platform) has undergone several significant changes. Let’s explore the new possibilities now available to advertisers:

• External links with no length restrictions:
This new feature allows advertisers to add special UTM tags to the URLs entered, providing detailed information about each traffic source.

• Fast food advertising now permitted:
The previous ban on promoting fast food products on the platform has been completely lifted.

• Information about reasons for ad rejection:
Telegram now informs advertisers which specific group of requirements their ad doesn’t meet, such as “Destination quality”, “Destination functionality”, “Irrelevant destinations”, or “Manipulation of content.”

• Metrics viewing for CTR, CPM, CPC, CPS of published ads:
Thanks to this new feature, advertisers can assess the effectiveness of their advertising campaigns.

• Ability to use custom emojis in ad text:
Capture the attention of potential clients and subscribers using unconventional emojis.

#AboutAds

Telegram Desktop updated to version 4.9.4

What's new:
— Default private chats / groups / channels notification settings.
— Forwarded / reply-to-a-story icon in chats list message preview.
— Bug fixes and other minor improvements.

Download: from official website or GitHub.

#update #desktop