Mad Bots | News, updates, etc...

☄️ Good news, everyone! Especially for @AximoBot users! Over the weekend we had an infrastructure incident. On Saturday night, the database went down completely, and the worst part is our monitoring didn't catch it. On Sunday it went down again, but partially this time. We patched things up, found a couple of weak spots, fixed them, and essentially wrote a brand new monitoring system from scratch to make sure this doesn't happen again. Premium users and those on trial periods have been given two extra days added to their subscriptions, so nobody loses out. Now, on to the actual updates, and there are quite a few this time: — YouTube downloads were broken for a while. Those guys love to periodically change things or block us, and that's exactly what happened this time. We got it back up and in the process found several pretty critical issues related to data delivery, added caching, and video delivery should be significantly better now. — Restored RSS-bridge. Turns out it had been down for a while and we didn't notice. — Unexpectedly discovered that some people use the vk.ru domain to connect VK accounts; previously only vk.com worked. Fixed, obviously. — We had some tricky legacy logic that preserved old limits for plans purchased 5-6 years ago. It was getting hard to maintain, so we've unified all plans. The couple dozen users affected have been upgraded to higher tiers. If something doesn't look right, hit up support. — By your request, we've added the topic ID to the data source export. — Fixed notifications reminding you to renew premium. Some of you kept forgetting and losing your extra sources. — Unexpectedly found out that the referral system was slightly broken. And yes, we do have one, check it out in the corresponding section. Need help? Ask any questions you like in our support group: @madbots_talk. ——————————— ☄️ Отличные новости! Особенно для пользователей @AximoBot! На выходных у нас случилась авария на инфраструктуре. В ночь с пятницы на субботу п

🛡 Good news, everyone! Especially for @ChatzillaBot users! Telegram bots are great until you need complex interfaces. At some point spammers drove us crazy and we decided to build our own moderator bot @ChatzillaBot. First we added anti-spam, then anti-block, then filters and it snowballed from there. Features piled up, but managing them through the bot was really inconvenient because there are no proper forms. So we went ahead and rebuilt the whole thing as a mini app. And it came out insanely convenient, in our humble opinion. So what's actually changed: — New verification types: math challenge and captcha. Channel subscription is now a separate verification type too. Before it was weird: first the user got verified, then got asked to subscribe again. — New validation logic: the bot only asks for verification when the user tries something that requires it. Like sending images, voice messages or links. And validation now works through buttons (well, except for captcha). — Something we've been working on for a really long time! Forget about knowing HTML, the app now has a visual editor with customizable text styles: bold, underline, strikethrough, italic. Type what you need, set the format and voila. — Premium emoji and button styling. Add premium emoji to messages and buttons without buying Telegram Premium. Button styles are customizable too. — Auto-blocking: configure how many violations over what period should send a user to ban. And for how long. — Triggers (auto-replies): exact match, word match, trigger when the word is NOT found, pin and delete messages. — Stop words: messages get deleted when a specific word is found. You can configure partial or full word matching. — Custom messages instead of system defaults. Visual editor with all the goodies: premium emoji, buttons, styles. — Everything is free for now. We might add a premium plan later once testing is complete. Need help? Ask any questions you like in our support group: @madbots_talk. ——————————— 🛡

🚩 Good news, everyone! And again for @ChatzillaBot users! Last time we didn't get to tell you everything about the bot, plus after migrating to the new system a lot of interesting things came up, so here we go: — Telegram gave everyone access to premium emoji, so we completely redesigned the bot's response to the start command. And a reminder that you can also use premium emoji in the bot's customizable replies. Instructions are available in the message editor. — Improved log output and chat statistics. Besides moderation tasks, the bot also tracks stats on incoming and deleted messages. We think many of you will find it useful to monitor user activity. — We checked the logs and noticed many of you use language filtering, so we decided to rework it. Previously the system detected the most likely language, but it could get confused on short messages or similar languages. Now it detects a list of probable languages and if at least one matches your allowed list, the message stays. — Discovered that the migration didn't work correctly for some filters, so for a few hours the bot went a bit rogue and was deleting things it shouldn't have. We fixed it quickly, but just in case go check your settings. — Significantly improved the auto-blocking logic. Now if you've enabled user notifications, the user will only get a warning when they're close to the limit before getting banned. Helps keep the chat clean from unnecessary messages. — Added two new categories to media filters: stickers and GIFs. If you're going to control media types, might as well control them all. — Slightly improved the karma section: added nice premium emoji to the rating list and auto-deletion of the message. It used to hang around forever and that was weird. — We're open to suggestions! If you have ideas for improving our bot, don't be shy, write to us. Need help? Ask any questions you like in our support group: @madbots_talk. ——————————— 🚩 Отличные новости! И снова для пользователей @ChatzillaBot!

💥 Good news, everyone! We keep migrating all our bots to the new architecture and unfortunately the process isn't as fast as we'd like. But what are the benefits? We've critically improved performance, optimized everything we could, added premium emoji support and mini apps. And the best part is that fixing one bot means all our bots get the same improvements. So here's a batch of updates for practically our entire legion of bots: @AuxioBot, @mad_ai_bot, @ChatZillaBot, @voice_remover_bot, @WTSong_bot, @NudesRemoverBot, @ChatPolyglotBot, @HypemeterBot, @AudioNinjaBot. This mostly applies to bots that now support mini apps. — Russia is actively blocking foreign traffic right now, so there's a good chance you'll have trouble opening our mini apps. We've added a miniapp command that lets you configure which domain to open. Plus we automatically detect your country and serve the right site. — Turns out some of you were using bots from Telegram's web version where mini apps didn't work. Surprised us, but we fixed it. — Reworked the file download logic from mini apps. Turns out it worked pretty poorly, plus it didn't count as messenger traffic which many of you get for free. Now when you tap the button, the bot sends the file to your private chat. Works way more reliably. — Also reworked the audio playback logic in mini apps for bots where it's relevant. Had its own quirks there too, but we sorted it out. — Redesigned interfaces for all bots on the new system: replaced regular emoji with premium ones on buttons and in messages. Looks way nicer. — Fixed chat statistics for @ChatzillaBot, @NudesRemoverBot and @ChatPolyglotBot. Also fixed the chat adding logic for group chats (it would glitch sometimes) and automatically added other group admins to chat commands. Need help? Ask any questions you like in our support group: @madbots_talk. ——————————— 💥 Отличные новости! Мы всё продолжаем переводить наших ботов на новую архитектуру и к сожалению процесс этот совсем не тако

🔈 Good news, everyone! Especially for @voice_remover_bot users! Time to remind you about our insanely useful audio separation bot. After a couple months of testing premium models, we're ready to make it official. Plus there's a bunch of other goodies. So, the bot now has a premium plan with a free 3-day trial. Why? Requests have grown massively, the server couldn't keep up, so we had to rent an additional GPU server which is far from cheap. We're hoping premium subscriptions will cover these costs, and now we can offer significantly better results for subscribers. Here's what you get: — Premium quality processing model — Track separation: 2 / 4 / 6 tracks — Export formats: MP3, M4A, WAV — Bitrate up to 320 kbps with lossless quality — Unlimited duration — High queue priority Second big change: premium plans now have unlimited generations, go wild. The free plan stays too with slightly updated logic: 20 minutes of free audio separation per week. According to our stats, that's more than enough for 99% of users. Beyond the paid plan, we optimized everything and fixed a ton of things: — Audio artwork was broken for a while in the mini app and inline search. Fixed. — A reminder: we have over 2.5 million already processed tracks in our system that you can instantly download via inline search or the mini app. — The system was unstable for a couple days after getting flooded with requests. Fixed, obviously. — The mini app player was broken: it was downloading all three files at once just to render the audio waveform (it just looks nicer with it), but this was eating your data and causing lag. — Several users asked to be able to hide their recordings from the public catalog since some of them can be private. We've added the ability to hide and unhide your uploaded recordings in the mini app. Hidden tracks won't appear in search or the catalog. Need help? Ask any questions you like in our support group: @madbots_talk. ——————————— 🔈 Отличные новости! Особенно для пользо

🔥 Good news, everyone! Hey, we've been hard at work polishing @download_it_bot to move it to the new system with a bunch of bonuses: global cache, improved speed, subtitle downloads and more. So in about 2-3 weeks there will be a brand new bot, and with it new pricing. We've kept the prices the same for over five years, but reality is that everything is getting more expensive, so we'll be raising the rates a bit too. Keep that in mind. Now on to the rest of the news, as always there's a bunch of fixes, improvements and more: @AudioNinjaBot. Music lovers, rejoice: — Significantly expanded the library, now 4M+ tracks totaling ~30 TB. — New Charts section: top tracks across 30+ countries. Any track can be downloaded. — Search now covers not only our database but also YouTube Music, so you can find pretty much anything. — Added the ability to download music videos and audio by YouTube link. Important: video will only be available if it is in the Music section. For other videos you can still download the audio — handy for interviews and podcasts. — You can also just send an audio file and the system will try to recognize the track and, if successful, let you choose what to do with it. — If search results contained a mix of RTL and LTR characters, the list now automatically adapts to whichever direction dominates. It looked really weird before. — And most importantly, the bot is completely free and ad-free. @ChatPolyglotBot. Some improvements here too: — Stabilized translations. Google has been blocking requests lately, so as a fallback the bot will now translate using neural networks. — Added a "translation in progress" message, since it can sometimes hang for 2-3 seconds and it wasn't clear what was happening. — Sometimes the bot translates a message but the original gets deleted by the author or a moderator bot. To avoid leaving the bot's reply hanging with nothing to reply to, this is now monitored and the bot will simply not send anything. Need help? Ask any que

🫦 Good news, everyone! Especially for @NudesRemoverBot users! User and chat counts keep growing, and with that the load, which is logical. But there are downsides. Over the past couple weeks the system slowed down several times, and once the queue grew to 1000+ items, so some messages got checked only an hour later. Obviously unacceptable. We sat down, thought hard, scratched our heads and optimized everything, rewrote queue processing, moved heavy tasks to separate workers, added dynamic caching and a bunch of tricks under the hood. Now even at peak hours processing runs smoothly. But it probably won't be enough. Almost 2 million messages pass through per day, nearly 100 thousand get analyzed. So we'll soon activate limits for free users. No panic, 95% won't notice. Initial plan: 100 processed messages per day. Processed means everything under the media filter. We may also display ads in the "media removed" notification (a minute, only our bots). Subscribers have no limits, no ads and priority processing. Enough about premium, plenty was done for everyone: — Stickers are small and detected poorly, so we've added a sticker pack blacklist. Add a link and content from that pack gets removed automatically. — Turned out stickers can be animated or video format, which the bot previously ignored. Fixed. — Fixed broken username display in bot messages. — Some users disliked messages from our account, and requested using their own bot. Available for premium. — Bad actors were sending links that looked like images but were actually video files weighing a couple gigabytes. The system tried to download and crashed. Added protection. — Advanced video analysis: we extract 10 frames and if one matches, media gets removed. Heavy on resources, subscribers only. Need help? Ask any questions you like in our support group: @madbots_talk. ——————————— 🫦 Отличные новости! Особенно для пользователей @NudesRemoverBot! Количество пользователей и чатов растёт, а с этим растёт и нагруз

🚀 Good news, everyone! Hey, long time no see, naturally because we've been crazy busy. As part of the migration to the new architecture, we had a huge task: move everything to a new database, ideally without anyone noticing. Which is exactly what we did over the past few days. We had to take @download_it_bot offline for about an hour and pause forwarding in @AximoBot for a couple hours, but the system caught up quickly. As a bonus, everything got even faster and more reliable, and we're planning a big update for @download_it_bot next week. Pricing will go up too, so grab it now at the old rates. And now some details on fixes and improvements: @AximoBot — Instagram decided to make our life harder again and worked very poorly. Fixed, of course. YouTube decided to do the same, so we had to fix that too. — Finally found and fixed why some sources were occasionally marked as disabled for premium users by mistake. — Translations have been unstable lately, so we increased the number of retries per translation, but Google still blocks us, so we're considering switching to AI translations. Stay tuned. — Did a global rework of the queue: in some cases sources could get stuck in checking for up to several days, which is unacceptable. Reworked everything, now it should fly. If not, let us know in the support group. — The AI rephrasing logic was acting up a bit, so we reinforced the system prompt to keep it behaving properly. @HypemeterBot Yep, we have a bot like this too. It's made to monitor social media, specifically likes, comments and views. In case you need it, a reminder that it exists. We fixed and slightly improved it too, maybe it'll come in handy. @ChatzillaBot Added a really cool feature: automatic translation of system messages into the user's language. Works with custom messages too. We detect the language from the properties Telegram itself provides, as well as by analyzing the name or bio. Need help? Ask any questions you like in our support group: @madbots_

📺 Good news, everyone! Hey, not a lot of news today, but it covers three bots at once. @ChatzillaBot Added a mega cool feature: join request management for groups. The scheme is pretty standard: enable join moderation and then either auto-approve or moderate manually. Feature list: — Auto-rejection rules: RTL characters in name or bio (a classic spam marker), accounts without a public @username. — Stop words in name and bio: each word on a separate line, with an option to require an exact full-word match. — Admin and user notifications: admins get a personal message when a request is auto-rejected by the rules, and the user gets a message explaining why. — Customizable welcome message with variables (name, username, chat title, chat link), buttons, plus an image or video attachment. — Test send buttons to preview everything before going live. @AudioNinjaBot Added inline search support. As a bonus, the bot can now be used in groups too. @mad_ai_bot A reminder that our free AI bot exists. It's not very popular, but we've improved a few things: — Noticed some requests got stuck due to provider-side errors. We reprocessed everything, so don't be surprised if some images arrived a few days late. — Some users were uploading HEIC format from iPhones for image editing. A bit odd, but we added support for this format. — Added music and audio generation plus text-to-speech. Figured it's easier to keep everything in one bot. — You can also upload an image for analysis and questions. Important: editing is done only through the mini app. — Added image editing by mask in the mini app. Just paint over the area you want to replace and describe how exactly. — For simple AI voice commands we added auto-splitting into several messages (Telegram has limits, and the bot can generate a lot of text) and response streaming (the bot sends the reply in parts instead of making you wait). Questions, bugs? @madbots_talk. ——————————— 📺 Отличные новости! Всем привет, сегодня новостей не оч

☄️ Good news, everyone! Especially for @download_it_bot users! It wasn't easy, but we did it. We've fully migrated @download_it_bot to the new system. This was long overdue since we'd hit the limits of the old architecture. There are a ton of changes, too many for one post. Let's start with plans: — Important: the migration is still ongoing, so issues are possible. To be fair, we've added a free week of premium for paid users. — As warned, we've updated the pricing tiers. We hadn't changed prices in over five years, and the cost of proxies, hardware and everything else has grown 2-3x in that time, so we had to adjust. We dropped the 6-month plan and replaced it with an annual one (with a 30% discount). — Brought back the free trial and extended it from 2 hours to a full day. Same scheme as our other bots: you link a card, NOTHING is charged, then the usual auto-renewal at your chosen interval. Note: since Stars and crypto don't support auto-renewal, the trial is available only when paying by card. You can cancel anytime. Now on to the features, and there are a lot: — One of our goals was a unified cache for all bots, and we pulled it off. We audited the data, removed junk and clones, grouped everything, and the total now reaches 800 terabytes and around 30 million files. All our users have access to this data through our bots. — Fully reworked architecture and the benefits are already visible. Stats show the new system pushed through twice as much data in a day. Total traffic per day is 2 terabytes. — Removed format selection for small files or when there's only one format. The bot just sends the media in max available size if it fits within 20 MB. — Dropped specific format selection (too many buttons) and now simply show the file resolution. — Added support for downloading 2K and 4K video. Important: Telegram only handles 1080p, so the video will be sent as a file. More in the next post. Need help? Ask any questions you like in our support group: @madbots_tal

💻 Good news, everyone! Especially for @download_it_bot users! Hey again, everyone! We're actively finishing up the bots, so there might be occasional glitches. Now let's continue with the news: — Oh, and we almost forgot: after moving to the new system we reset everyone's trial usage, so you can try our premium features again. — For YouTube, added the option to download the full video description and subtitles in your chosen language. — Taught YouTube to download only part of a file. Just specify the timing and get a clip. Premium only, since we go a bit around the system here. — We accidentally lost the audio format selection during the migration. It's all back in place now! — Added format display on the buttons instead of plain numbers. It looks nicer and makes choosing easier. — Moved the "send media description or not" option from settings to the format selection screen. It's also saved per service, so you can configure where you want descriptions and where you don't. — Added editing of downloaded audio and video. Videos can be trimmed by length, and audio converted to the format you need with a specified bitrate. — The Files section became a full file storage. Premium users can now upload their own files, and if it's media you get the option to edit it. We also added proper pagination, a convenient way to browse your data, and filters by service. And yes, we added a mini app, where we duplicated the My Files section with search and more, some may find it more convenient there. Reworked the affiliate program: — We dropped giving premium for invited users, since our analysis showed 99% of them were bots. But we increased the percentage we pay you from user subscriptions, and importantly, you can now receive it to your personal wallet as TON or get premium instead. — We're also now ready to give premium accounts for ads in personal blogs. Post a video, hit 10K+ views, contact us and we'll give you premium. Need help? Ask any questions you like in our support g

🔥 Good news, everyone! Especially for @download_it_bot users! Hey, we keep polishing the bot, so here's a fresh batch of fixes and improvements: — Fixed the biggest pain point: uploading heavy files to Telegram. It took some effort, but now even a couple-gig file is no problem for us. — Added smart control of link lifetime and requesting fresh formats. Otherwise you'd sometimes hit an error when trying to download something. — Fixed download freezing, an issue where requesting the same URL gave you nothing for 5 minutes. — Reworked file splitting into multiple files for Ultra plans. Now it's sent as separate files and each is stored separately in history. — Added a legend explaining that some formats may be unavailable due to plan limits, since not everyone understood what was going on. — Added an option to not send the caption. Turns out some people find it more convenient. — Figured out how pin.it handles redirects for short links, so it'll work much more reliably. Also greatly sped up processing of YouTube and FB short links. — Some services used odd formats for previews, so the image wasn't visible during format selection. Fixed it and added automatic conversion to formats Telegram understands. We also cache them, so the response is instant for cached data. — The audio export logic was a bit slow and miscounted traffic. Fixed. — Audio export is now also written to cache, it used to get lost. Not good. — If a file is already in cache, the format will show the size of the cached file. Just a reminder: we show approximate sizes, the exact size is only clear after downloading. — Built a smart size calculation for services where audio and video are separate tracks. We used to take the best audio quality, and on big videos the audio could end up larger than the video. Fixed: if you're downloading a low resolution, there's no point dragging heavy audio along. Need help? Ask any questions you like in our support group: @madbots_talk. ——————————— 🔥 Отличные новости! О

💥 Good news, everyone! Especially for @download_it_bot users! Hey, it's us again. The bot might be a bit shaky these past few days since we're very actively working on optimization, improvements and just polishing the little things. Plus the more we work on speed, the more links you throw at it for processing and everything starts lagging again. That's life. Now, what's new and not so new: — Files with non-Latin names now get a proper name. We also slightly raised the filename limit to 65 bytes, sadly no more, it's a Telegram technical limit. — Fixed format priorities, figured out why some were getting lost, and tweaked correct codecs. — On some services the bot got confused about the selected format and could send you a 4K video instead of what you requested, eating your traffic instantly. Fixed. — Moved the ability to disable captions, meta info and media descriptions into settings. It's a global setting, so fewer buttons during format selection. — Fixed a menu bug where the system complained about someone else's click. The URL-owner check logic in groups was broken. — Fixed that already-downloaded files are available for priority services without a size check. Previously plan limits kicked in, which is incorrect. — Preview images were sometimes sent incorrectly. Fixed. — Turned out TikTok uses some odd audio codec in its videos, and on audio export it didn't play for everyone. Now it's fine, downside being the file grew a bit in size. — Built a clever geo-block bypass for YouTube, plus made a million optimizations for it (token caching, handler warmup and other technical stuff). — Improved Spotify links. We can't download directly from it, but the system automatically finds an alternative on YouTube. — Downloading generated subtitles sometimes worked incorrectly. Fixed. — Auto-download without format selection is now in settings. If you want to save traffic or download audio right away, you now can. — Turned out due to tricky copyright laws YouTube and Instagra

🎉 Good news, everyone! Especially for @download_it_bot users! Hey again. We keep improving, optimizing and fixing bugs. And given the load and the number of requests, there's plenty of them. Anyway, let's get to the list of what's new and not only. Brace yourselves, there's a lot: — We moved the bot to the new system, but not your file history. So we had to run a migration, it took us almost two weeks, and we moved ~2 million files, which is a lot to put it mildly. The point? It all goes into cache, which means you get instant access to previously downloaded files with search. — YouTube: built a clever geo-block bypass plus a million optimizations (token caching, handler warmup and other technical stuff). Fixed generated subtitles downloading incorrectly. Some videos are unavailable, require authorization or are geo-restricted, the bot used to just error out, now we show the preview and title, and if there's data in cache you can download it (just no new formats). — Files with non-Latin names now get a proper name. We also slightly raised the filename limit to 65 bytes, sadly no more, it's a Telegram technical limit. — Google video search links and Google "Share" links (share.google/…) now unfold into the real source too. — New Apple iPhone compatibility mode: turn it on and video always arrives in H.264, which plays on any iPhone. Without it, some videos (VP9/AV1) show only the first frame and sound. — Albums and carousels the new way: pick the quality once for the whole group, and the entire album arrives in the resolution you chose. The picker header shows the contents, like "7 videos + 1 photo". Album results are cached, resending arrives instantly with no re-download (works even when the source is unavailable). — Fixed format priorities, figured out why some were getting lost, and tweaked correct codecs. On some services the bot got confused and could send a 4K video instead of the requested one, eating your traffic, that's fixed too. — Moved the ability to

🔵 Good news, everyone! Especially for @AximoBot users! We haven't written about Aximo for almost two months, but don't think we were sitting idle. All this time we were preparing to migrate your favorite forwarder bot to the new system, but got buried, since it turned out to be quite tricky. Part of the system (the monitoring in particular) is already migrated, all that's left is to switch everything to the same delivery system as @download_it_bot and get what this was all started for: shared logic, shared cache, and a million improvements overall. Also a heads-up: over the next week the system might glitch a bit due to updates, so don't hesitate to write to our support group right away. Now let's get to the updates, this time the news is mostly good, but there's one bad one: — You've been waiting for this for a while, and we finally managed to bring back Instagram Stories delivery. Enabled in settings, they arrive as is, in the original quality. — Bad news: services have significantly upgraded their anti-bot protection lately, and it's now much harder to pull videos out of them. So keep in mind the bot might send you an image instead of a video. Premium users are in a better spot here, since they use a special proxy pool that services let through. — Fixed TikTok photos with music. Before, such a post only delivered the audio, just the track with no picture. Now the photo itself arrives together with the music as a video. — Instagram carousels with multiple videos are delivered in full. Before, some media could get lost. — Heavily upgraded Reddit: galleries are now delivered in full, and GIFs and external videos are detected as video and arrive as a playable clip instead of a placeholder image. — Sorted out post order in TikTok. The service serves pinned clips first and without a date, which made "Force send latest post" actually send the pinned (old) clip. Now we compute the real publish date, cut off the pinned ones, and the genuinely latest post goes out. — Rem

🔔 Good news, everyone! Hey everyone, we're up to our necks working on @AximoBot, but we haven't forgotten about the other bots either. We've got plenty to show off, so let's go. Let's start with @download_it_bot: — Spun up a separate pool of Russian proxies, delivery from VK, Yandex and Odnoklassniki got noticeably more stable. — Added support for streams and podcasts, including Twitter Spaces, important note: only finished podcasts and streams can be downloaded. — A reminder that the bot supports downloading from closed and copy-protected channels and groups in Telegram. Works only for premium users with a linked account. — Galleries with more than 10 photos now arrive in full as a single post, instead of being cut to 10 items. We also added support for Twitter, Reddit and Instagram galleries, with the option to download in original quality as documents or compressed as pictures. — Mixed posts (several photos + video) on Twitter are now restored as a full gallery, before the bot only grabbed the video and the photos got lost. — Instagram Stories can now be downloaded directly by a link to a specific story, as long as it's still available, of course. — VK now has clear captions with resolution in the format description instead of technical codes. — The "no caption / no description / no meta" settings now apply everywhere, rock solid. With so many media types, they used to get lost sometimes. — By accident we noticed the free plan's limits were also being applied to files already in cache. Fixed. — TikTok videos sometimes arrived without audio, but only on larger files. Took some effort, but fixed. — Premium users: the "Download timed out" notification no longer arrives early (the real budget is 30 minutes, it used to be 10, which was wrong). — Fixed the picker freezing after watching an ad. Now about @InstantMediaBot: we analyzed the bot's traffic and, to put it mildly, were shocked: almost 90% of the traffic was generated by bots in empty groups, and it was seri

✍️ Good news, everyone! Especially for @download_it_bot users! The system's been shaky for a few days, we looked into it and got a bit shocked: roughly 0.5% of users were generating around 20% of the total load. So we'll soon be tightening some limits a bit and adding automatic checks, since the other 99.5% were suffering because of it and that needed fixing. Now for your favorite segment: improvements and new features: — Launched a discount coupon system: whoever reads the news first gets lucky with a 15% coupon, hidden here ➡️ DW15. Hurry, it's limited! Keep an eye on our news so you don't miss future discounts. — We finally merged the database with media delivered by @AximoBot over the past year, so now we have metadata for roughly 40M links and files totaling almost 1.5 petabytes. Don't forget, access to cached data is completely free! — A cache is great, but what's the point if you can't search it? So we did a lot of work on inline search: optimized it, made the format more convenient, and fixed a case where it silently failed if the file had been deleted from Telegram's servers. — Telegram rolled out a new format called RichMessage: it lets you send more than 10 media items in one message (handy for Instagram, since galleries there can have 20 photos) and descriptions of several kilobytes (the current limit is 1024 characters, and YouTube descriptions often don't fit). We rebuilt everything on the new system, but ran into a couple of issues: for video the Download button didn't show up (killing the whole point of the bot), streaming wasn't supported either, and the thumbnail got lost when forwarding a link to the post. So we had to roll it all back for video (the description still gets cut, but you can download it separately via the button), but it works great for photo galleries, up to 50 pictures plus long text. — Upgraded the File Library: every file shows its save date, free users see the storage period (30 days), the next deletion date and how many fil

🎉 Good news, everyone! Especially for @AximoBot users! Hey again, everyone! We're still hard at work moving Aximo over to the new logic, we seriously underestimated the amount of work involved, so we'll fully wrap it up closer to the first half of September. In the process we lost some things, gained some others. Fair warning: we're reworking a lot, plans, prices and the feature list, so while you still can, grab it at the old prices. Also, since there were some glitches for a while, we've added two extra weeks of premium for all trial and premium users, so nobody feels shortchanged. We also brought back sending news as personal messages, since it looks like pretty much nobody reads the channel. And we keep getting the same questions over and over in the support group. The logic is simple: if you haven't read the news in any of the bots, we'll send it to you as a DM, but only once. Anyway, now for the good stuff, what we added and reworked! — Shocking news! Added support for Telegram's new RichMessage format, and it's genuinely great: limits got a lot higher, a single post can now hold more than 10 media items and you can send up to 32,000 characters of text. Before that we had to cut the extra or split messages. Text posts can now be delivered as a full article with images in the original order, rather than a media group with text attached. You can appreciate the whole thing best on RSS and Reddit sources. — VK went down for a couple of days, they decided once again to fence themselves off from bots. We found a workaround, of course, though it's not clear yet how long it'll keep working. As a bonus, VK started using emoji instead of pictures in some places, so those will now be delivered too. — LiveJournal isn't exactly popular these days, but we added the logic so articles from there arrive in full format too, just like RSS and Reddit. — Twitter / X: quotes and retweets now display properly, you see the text that was replied to or quoted, along with its media.

✖️ Good (and bad) news, everyone! Let's start with the most important thing, and it's about @AximoBot. Twitter, aka X.com, decided to declare war on every service that pulls their data, and buried them under threats of lawsuits. So our Twitter support went down for several days, since we were running something similar ourselves and it all got cut off. We found a couple of alternative solutions, of course, but they're very limited. Right now, for free users we can only support so-called public accounts on Twitter, meaning non-NSFW and non-protected ones. Checking is easy: just open the account in incognito mode, if you see fresh posts there, Aximo will pull them too. If you see a stub with old posts instead, that means Twitter has restricted output for accounts like that, and there's nothing we can do about it. On top of that, getting this data is painfully slow, since we have to pull it through a browser, so for free accounts the lag can reach up to 24 hours. For premium accounts things are a bit better, we hooked up a paid API that we route all premium traffic through, but it isn't free, and now every check costs us a pretty penny. We were already planning to review our paid plans, and now we'll most likely have to adjust them upward. Expect new limits, plans and terms in a couple of weeks. Mini apps, subscriptions and payments — Added an unlink chat button to the mini app. Keep in mind that once unlinked, the bot stops working in that chat so we don't burn resources for nothing. You can reconnect the chat at any time and everything will be active again. And if the chat has an active subscription, it'll keep working until the end of the period, but we'll ask you to cancel it before unlinking, otherwise it gets awkward: you unlink, forget about it, and still get charged. — Plan upgrades now work like actual upgrades. The old plan closes immediately, auto-renewal is cancelled, and unused days are converted into days on the new plan. — We remembered that for bots wo

☄️ Good news, everyone! Especially for @download_it_bot and @InstantMediaBot users! Hey everyone! We've been busy, as usual. This time we sat down to optimize the downloader, our servers were already on fire from the load, and got a little carried away. So, as always, a whole pile of updates, improvements and changes. — Downloads got 3-5x faster, and up to 20x from distant servers. We spent a week digging into why the same files would sometimes fly and sometimes crawl: the problem wasn't the sources or the proxies, but our own infrastructure settings. Because of them American and Asian sources gave us 100-200 KB/s over a gigabit connection on both ends. Fixed, of course. — Added a slideshow instead of a gallery. New toggle in settings: a set of files arrives as a swipeable slideshow, one frame at a time, instead of a mosaic. Looks pretty cool, give it a try. — Added RichMessage for single videos, another toggle for those who want the video with a cover and caption in one message when descriptions are massive. Telegram simply has a 1024 character limit on media captions. — OK.ru works again. In September they changed their page format and everything broke, so we had to write our own parser. — Videos from a collage can now be downloaded as a file. When the bot sends several clips as one card, you couldn't save them, the menu had neither "Save" nor "Forward". Added a button. — The bot now replies almost instantly. Listing everything we improved would take a while, but the bot is genuinely fast now, even when you bury it in messages. — Fixed the preview in the card. The cover could end up being from a completely different clip and survived any number of "Refresh" presses. Now refreshing works, and a wrong cover gets discarded even if it's sitting in cache. — Download progress is alive again. The card used to sit at 0% for the entire download and then the file would just show up, so it was unclear whether the bot was working or stuck. — Sorted out Instagram formats, a

👀 Good news, everyone! Unexpectedly, it's us again. Yes, we published news just a few days ago, but we've piled up so many changes that releasing them bit by bit would stretch out over several months. So let's continue. There's a separate mega post coming for @AximoBot, and there'll probably be three or four of those in a row, so for now let's go through the rest of the bots. We've done plenty there too. So, updates, fixes, improvements: @download_it_bot and @InstantMediaBot — MEGA NEWS! There are so many updates that we decided to reset everyone's trials, so you can try the new features all over again. And as a bonus, we've got a discount coupon, ➡️DW10, if you decide to grab a plan. — File size is now determined precisely instead of by eyeballing it. In a couple of places it was estimated from the resolution, and on a long clip it was off by multiples: a 96 MB video could be counted as 300 and hit your plan's limit even though it fit easily. Now we ask the server for the real size, and small files no longer get blocked over a wrong estimate. — Download progress is honest again. It not only shows the real progress but also starts at zero instead of ten percent, before the bar started out already filled and there was no way to tell how much was left. — Downloading got noticeably more resilient. The problem was this: the bot would start downloading, the proxy would drop, it'd pick another one and retry with the old link, which only worked with the previous proxy. Now, if a link is tied to a specific proxy and that proxy goes down, the bot runs the cycle again: requests fresh media data, gets a fresh link and finishes the download with it. — Reddit titles no longer get cut off mid-word. The cause turned out to be unexpected: it's not our code doing the cutting but the downloader itself, it truncates the title at 72 characters and puts the full one in a separate field nobody was looking at. Now we look and restore it. — The "already downloaded" icon came back for au

🆕 Good news, everyone! It's us again, and let's start with the most important thing: we completely reworked how the free period for trying out the bots' premium features is given out! No more linking a card or picking a plan upfront. The scheme is simple: you start the trial (if you haven't already) and that's it. With @download_it_bot you can download ANY 10 links from the services the bot supports. Only successful downloads count. For @voice_remover_bot we give out free processing runs, for @NudesRemoverBot it's premium for a week as before, and for @AximoBot we went back to the old scheme: premium features for a week, but only for 25 sources, which is more than enough to check out the whole thing. And if you like what you see, it's the standard flow from there: pick a plan and buy it, or stay on the free one, up to you. And the second big news: all our mini apps now open from a computer, not just inside Telegram. Log in with your Telegram account, open it on a desktop and configure things with a keyboard. And the login no longer falls off: the 30 day session wasn't actually being saved and you had to log in again. A small reminder: if you don't like getting the newsletter in your DMs and you don't read it in the bots anyway, just open any news post and unsubscribe from it. There's a special checkbox at the bottom, both in the bot and in any mini app. And now the list of changes, fixes and everything else, of course we've got those too. @download_it_bot and @InstantMediaBot — Fixed cover cropping. Before, if the image and the video had different proportions, the frame was always cropped, and vertical videos lost their edges. Now we only crop when the orientations don't match, otherwise we just add padding with a blurred copy of the frame. — YouTube community posts can now be downloaded. Links like youtube.com/post/… used to get rejected with a "not supported" message. Handy if you want to grab a photo gallery from there. — Fixed previews from VK and Odnoklass

🔥 Good news, everyone! We've been working toward this for a long time and can finally announce it: @AximoBot has been completely rebuilt. Get comfortable, because there's going to be a lot of news, over the next three or four weeks we'll be writing mostly about your favorite bot for delivering posts from social media and RSS. News number one: the bot is now available not just as @AximoBot but also simply as @Aximo. We bought the name quite a while ago, but never got around to upgrading the bot to promo status, since that costs a thousand stars. But since we were rebuilding everything anyway, we figured it was worth splashing out. So the bot now has all the premium features, though you're probably only interested in one: the ability to publish premium emoji. No more crutches with a linked premium account, you just add them to your template and it works. Or if your source is a Telegram channel that publishes premium emoji too, you'll get everything as is. And as a bonus, we added the ability to publish posts, but we'll talk about that in more detail a bit later, there's far too much to cover. The second big piece of news: we built a proper website for the bot, aximo.bot. It's more of a promo site: all the plans and how the system works. But you'll probably find the documentation section the most interesting, since you can calmly go through all the available features on a computer, showing all that inside the bot is a bit awkward. I think you've already noticed that we completely removed configuration from the bot itself, everything now lives in the mini app. The reason is pretty simple: there's a lot of functionality now, and for complex configs like filters, replacements and templates, a chat was simply a nightmare that generated a pile of errors. Yes, the mini app works from a phone, but you can also use it from a computer: just log in through Telegram and configure everything however you like in a convenient interface. Two more things about the mini app: — Ev

⚡️ Good news, everyone! And we're continuing to report on what we've built into Aximo, features and everything else. The main change, of course, is that all settings, both global and per-source, moved into the mini app, because that's the only place where we could properly build an editor, dropdowns, checkboxes and all the other things you're used to. And that let us do a lot of cool stuff, since before we were simply blocked by the limits of a chat. Alright, let's go through the changes: — We removed the cap on how many groups and channels you can connect, on every plan including the free one. So connect as many as you need, within the other limits of your plan. — We basically rebuilt how the bot works, and now buttons, menus and the source list open instantly: on large accounts this used to take half a minute. — Just a reminder that we can't guarantee video delivery for free plans. But we found a loophole so that media from public Telegram channels is delivered reliably. There is a limit from Telegram itself though: 20 MB for video and 5 MB for photos, anything bigger they don't show in the web version. — New formatting options: you can set where the media goes, above or below the post. And media groups can now be delivered as a slideshow instead of a gallery. — And if slideshows work, that means Aximo fully supports Telegram's new RichMessage format. Which means you can now deliver up to 50 media per post and a whole 32,000 characters of text. Before that the limit was 10 media and 4,000 characters, so we had to build crutches and split or trim posts. — Default media: if you want a post to always have a video or photo even when the source didn't send one, you can now set that up. — Premium users can send filtered posts somewhere separate, and we replaced a channel with a group there, because sometimes you need them in a specific topic. You can also paste a link to a forum topic instead of just an ID or @username, and the format is validated as you type. — Sour

🙂 Good news, everyone! Especially for @Aximo users! Hey everyone, it's us again and again about Aximo: like we warned, there's a whole lot of news and changes. The most interesting part for you is that we reset the "free trial used" flag for everyone, absolutely everyone who had it before October 1. So if that's relevant to you, you can try the premium features for free again. And now to the features, we changed a lot of things, both for paid plans and free ones. — An important note about video delivery. We can't guarantee media delivery on free plans, especially heavy files, but sometimes it still works out. And we recently discovered that TikTok and Twitter had actually been broken for the last couple of weeks and were sending photos only. We poked around a bit, found places worth improving and fixed them. We still won't be able to deliver everything, but we managed to bring back some of the video. — A super feature "Smart RSS": any site can now be a source, even one without a feed. You send a link to the site, not to the feed, the homepage or a section is enough, and @Aximo will find the RSS or Atom link the site publishes: most of them have one. From there the feed is checked and added like any other source. And if there's no feed, an AI model reads the structure of the page and, if the site is structured (news, a blog, a catalog), builds a feed of its posts. So layers like rss-bridge or rss-proxy aren't needed anymore. — Media can go above the text or below it. By default in Telegram the photo or video goes on top with the caption under it: turn on the "Description above media" setting and the order swaps. — A new "Title below text" toggle in templates: the post text first, with the title and the link to the original underneath. Handy if you don't want to fight with template settings. — A super cool "Default media" option. Upload a photo or video and it gets inserted into the post if the source didn't give any media or we failed to download it. No more "naked