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Content index
Since we always talk about projects Open source and good news and alternatives, we have decided that the time has probably come for us to do a little self-recognition too! In fact, for some time now the Le Alternative Telegram bot has been renewed with many features. And, as you might imagine, we released it to open code 1 and with MIT license.
For all those who are not on Telegram: unlike most messaging applications, on Telegram it is possible to create bots using almost anyone type of programming language. Thanks to interaction with other sites and programs it is possible to allow these bots to really do anything.
•Le Alternative's Telegram bot
We decided to build a kind of Swiss Army knife For The Alternatives leaving the bot to open code (so anyone can take inspiration from it) and also leaving the possibility of being used by anyone privately and within any group. So you can invite him as administrator in your group and let me suggest alternatives!
The main features of the bot are:
Search for alternatives
- online search: It's an almost unique feature of Telegram. By typing the name of the bot (like this: @LeAlternativeBot) within any chat you will evoke it and you will be able to search within a series of predefined alternatives that we have carefully prepared;
- if nothing is found you can use the command /search for alternative. In this way the bot will respond with the first three results it finds on this site. For example if you write: /search for pepper will send you the link to visit the article Pepper & Carrot. This command works both privately and within groups;
Alternative front ends
Inside the groups when the bot sees a YouTube link, Twitter, Reddit And Medium in all their forms it is automatically activated and will respond to the offending message by listing the alternative front-ends on which to view those links. To better understand, here is a video:
In private, however, will respond to each message individually with a link inside YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, Medium and also Imgur listing different front ends for each domain. To understand better, if you privately feed him a link of YouTube he will answer you like this:
Le Alternative's Telegram bot: URL rollout
Another interesting function that we wanted to include both to protect privacy but also to help you have greater online security is the unrolling of shortened URLs. As you know, there are shortened URLs that hide the real address you will arrive at and what's more they will try to track you as much as possible. We talked about it here, here and also here.
The Le Alternative Telegram bot both privately and within any group in which it is an administrator will recognize the link and reveal its real address. Let's see an example of how it works below:
Translation of messages
Although this last feature has perhaps become a little obsolete due to the new function translate on Telegram 2 our bot can translate, privately and even within the groups in which it is the administrator, any text. And to do this, use a Instance random by Lingva Translate, an alternative front-end to Google Translate.
To translate your own text, simply write: /trad how are you?, to translate someone else's text instead, simply reply to the message by writing only the command /trad. Let's see below how it works:
Search on DuckDuckGo
The last feature of our bot is that of being able to create a button to search for results on DuckDuckGo. It can be used privately or you can also use it within groups where the bot is the administrator. In this case you just need to write /duck phrase to search for and a little button will appear which, if pressed, will lead to a search on DuckDuckGo with that phrase.
In our opinion, this is a very useful option to help people online and to avoid using the phrase: “search on Google” inappropriately!
Other commands
The bot does much more, in fact it has some personalized commands that we use when you report errors, news and more within Telegram groups: thanks to a simple command we can open automatically issue on Codeberg.
Finally, there are other secondary commands such as: /start to execute it, /privacy to see what data we keep, /alternatives to find out a few things we do and finally /instructions to understand how the bot works.
• •Join communities
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