The Scarabeus dashboard and connecting your own bot

Scarabeus used to be just a bot: settings lived on our side, and there was nowhere to look at what it had deleted overnight. This release fixes the main thing — the product now has a dashboard.

The dashboard and signing in with Telegram#

You sign in with your Telegram account — no password, no separate registration. The dashboard opens both as a regular website and as a mini app inside Telegram, so you can start setting things up on your phone and finish at your computer.

Inside you get a list of chats, an overview for each one and a chat switcher in the sidebar. Chats and bots are listed with their Telegram avatars, so you spot the right group instead of reading its name.

Your own bot instead of a shared one#

The heart of this release is connecting your own bot. Your group gets a bot with your name and your avatar rather than a faceless service account — while all the moderation and settings stay in the Scarabeus dashboard.

Here is how it goes:

1. Create a bot in @BotFather, or take one you already have.
2. Copy its token.
3. Paste the token into the dashboard and press "Connect bot".
4. Add the bot to your group and make it an administrator — the chat shows up in the dashboard and gets linked to that bot.

The token is stored encrypted and used only for moderation. If it expires or you reissue it in @BotFather, the dashboard lets you update the token without reconnecting your chats.

One account can hold several bots and several chats, which helps when you run a network of groups or keep chats for different projects. Unlinking a bot from a chat, or removing it from the group, also happens in the dashboard — no need to go into Telegram and clean up administrators by hand.

Bot settings and chat settings#

Configuration lives on two levels. A bot has its own settings that apply to all of its chats, and every chat has settings of its own. Chat settings always win: if something is set explicitly for a group, the bot-wide setting stays out of it. That way a single bot can serve both a strict work chat and a free-for-all one without becoming two different bots.

First statistics#

The chat overview now shows the basic numbers: how many members, how many messages, how many violations caught. For now it really is just an overview — detailed charts and event logs are coming in later releases.