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IRC /me (or 'ACTION') Messages
Tynach, Jan 12, 2021 at 06:07, edited
OpenSuggestionGeneral

Something analogous to /me (aka ACTION messages) in IRC, where the sender's display name is prepended to the rest of the message's text.

On IRC, Steam, Matrix (Riot.im / Element.io), Second Life, Skype, many old-school instant messaging platforms, and to an extent even Discord, a user named 'Bob' can type something like:

/me eats lunch.

And when they send that post, it will be rendered as:

Bob eats lunch.

Discord, however, will only italicize text, similar to if you'd wrapped your post in underscores or asterisks.. And right now, Telegram doesn't support the feature at all.

While it's true that this is frequently used — and often associated — with online roleplaying, that is not the only use case (nor is it likely the most common use case). It's often more fluent to use when simply telling people what you're doing at a given moment, such as the above example of Bob eating lunch.

Popular Feature

There have been many people requesting this feature on the Telegram Desktop issue tracker on Github. 37 people have directly participated (myself included), and 83 people have given the initial post a thumbs up. However, not much has been done because it's an API issue (which has also been added as a label on the issue there).

There are bots that sorta try to implement it, but this does not work in one-on-one conversations, nor is it ideal to have the name of the bot at the top of every action post.

Alternate Syntax

I know there have been some concerns about the fact that /me is hard to type on mobile devices. I happen to also know that some services, such as instances of TinyMUCK, provide a similar mechanism by simply typing a colon. This variant often also supports 's immediately after the colon as well, which is a feature that many implementations of /me lack (though a few support it, such as Second Life's).

A colon might also be hard to type on mobile, but the reason I bring it up is that I'm not strictly advocating for the /me syntax, although I'll admit it's what I'm used to and prefer. I'm open to using some other syntax, or even having to right-click (or long press) on the 'send' button for a 'send as action' option to appear.

The idea isn't to make Telegram behave like IRC, it's to give users a quick and easy way to refer to themselves in the third (second?) person, whether that be to communicate how they feel about a topic, what they're currently doing, or for roleplaying on the Internet.

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Grigory Petrov Feb 19, 2021
As a long-time IRC user I miss this feature a lot 😊 In some situations it's way batter to express social situation and emotions than emoji. Especially important now with all this work-from-home and everything-remote attitude /me sighs
Anton Zhuchkov Apr 12, 2021
This feature is very useful in groups. Please implement it. As many people I miss it a lot from IRC times. We moved our local groups from IRC to Telegram but really lack the /me command.
akaWolf Jul 12, 2021
I've been waiting for a few years to see that basic feature in Telegram...
Dmitry Dubinin Jul 23, 2021
Please implement it. As many people I miss it a lot from IRC times!
Charlie Sep 15, 2021
add /me feature please!
N
NémO Olivier 🐙 Jan 22, 2022
Ho please, seeing all the feature in Telegram, can you please add this simple one and let the old one like me to just remembre the good all time IRC hours ? And as noted : it's _usefull_ !
Dmitry Mar 21, 2022
Please add this feature. I every now and again send /me-messages, and it's a pity this feature is not supported
Tigger 🔜 The Void (she/they) Jul 27, 2022
This feature is available in many other clients, and it breaks my brain every time I try to use it on Telegram and it's not there.. I do not see a downside to adding it.
Л
Леонид Sep 27, 2023
Would love to have it!
Also, i think, it should not be in message counters, so we may use it as silent bot notifications
Tynach Sep 27, 2023
Леонид
Would love to have it! Also, i think, it should not be in message counters, so we may use it as silent bot notifications
Leaving it out of message counters would defeat the purpose for the vast majority of use cases, which involve conveying that someone is doing something as part of an ongoing conversation.

A separate feature for making 'notification-less messages' should be its own thing, especially since for such messages you'd rarely want the poster's display name included at the start of the message itself (which is a key part of this particular proposal).
Andrew H Jan 10, 2024
I've been missing this feature since I started using Telegram (probably since 2017), but I only recently found out about this bug tracker. Thanks for the card, upvoted!

/me wonders if there really aren’t old-school Internet geeks (in a good way, of course) among the devs?
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