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Bots on telegram shouldn't require a verified Facebook/twitter/Instagram to get verified.
Reasoning for this is that a lot of bots are telegram specific, and have no reason to have any presence on other platforms. Additionally, they can still be imitated and faked, which hurts end users using fake bots.
Making these popular bots stand out would also improve the incentive for bot developers to produce good bots, as they would be rewarded with knowing that their users are at lower risk of being exposed to fakes.
Of course, "large" and "popular" is an opinionated topic; but i trust the devs to determine a fair policy.
However, some methods could be:
- rate of growth
- number of chats
- number of users who have /start-ed
To avoid people gaming the system, it would be fine for the "verification" to require interaction, eg:
- botfather sends a "you can verify your bot" prompt when it gets big enough
- request verification through bot support/verifybot who can check the bot stats and approve/disapprove
I'm the developer of @MentionRobot, @MentionMirrorbot and @MentionTestBot.
I recently discovered that there were dozens of fakes of my bots on Telegram.
A user wrote to me to complain that my bot had deleted all of his chat members.
When I checked everything, it turned out that he had added a fake bot. This fake bot had deleted all of his chat members!
This is terrible.
I wrote an email with a list of fake bots on abuse@telegram.org and now I'm waiting for an answer. But verifying popular bots would be a very good option against fakes.
I attached screenshots of this case. And there are dozens of such fakes.
=> disable them on Global Search