GetIDsBot

Introduction.

GetIDsBot is a chatbot for the Telegram Messaging Plattform which main purpose is to extract useful informations from messages that are normally hidden and to enhance them. This means...

• converting file_sizes and durations to human readable formats.
• interpolating account creation dates from the users chat_id.
• displaying it all tree(1)'ish'.

Using this bot. Host one yourself.

You will need a bot token from the BotFather and a server with nodejs and npm installed to run it. Yes, bots are programs and they must run on some computer.

Account creation dates.

Most people want to use this, so here is a bit of explanation for all of you: Telegram gives each chat (that is users, bots, groups and channels) a globally unique numerical id. These id numbers aren't given out sequentially, so two users signing up at the exact same time will probably have a difference of up to a few millions. Two possible reasons are:

• Sharding: Telegram registrations won't all happen on the same server. To avoid giving out the same id twice, all registration servers reserve a range of ids from the central registry and periodically fetch new ones.
• Obfuscation: You should not be able to guess the signup date from one's id.

This is still speculation, and we don't know for certain, but averaged out over a year or so, the IDs do still increase. There are some exceptions, but guessing is still possible.

We collected a bunch of ids for which we knew the rough creation dates, anonymized the dates and used some dark magic called "maths" to estimate a creation date.

Setup

• Clone repository.
• Run npm install into repository directory.
• Run node index.js or create the systemd.service bot-getid.service.