Watcher Ops / Escalation Group

An Escalation Group is a private Telegram group your team controls — it's both the place Watchers send questions they can't confidently answer, and the project's real moderation operations/audit channel. Some teams call it "Watcher Ops" — there's no required naming convention.

Connect one from a Project's Communities tab using "+ Connect Escalation Group." It works through the exact same Telegram-connection flow as connecting an ordinary Community: add the Watcher's bot to your private group, then verify it from the dashboard, picking a Watcher whose bot confirms the connection.

Only one Watcher needs to be deployed into the Escalation Group for it to work for the whole Project — every other Watcher across the Project's Communities can still raise escalations and moderation reports through it. The verified answer to a question is always relayed back through the ORIGINAL escalating Watcher's own bot, into its own Community — never a different Watcher's identity.

Multiple Watchers and multiple Communities in the same Project can share one Escalation Group.

Two kinds of posts show up there, visually distinguished so you can tell them apart at a glance: a Knowledge Escalation (the originating Community, the escalating Watcher, the asking member, the original question, and a note that no confirmed answer was found — reply directly to that message in Telegram to answer it), and a Moderation Action report (a warning, temporary mute, kick, message purge, or scam/NSFW removal a Watcher already took on its own — see "Watcher Ops Moderation Reports"). A moderation report is informational only — replying to it doesn't do anything; the enforcement it describes has already happened.

Authorization for answering a question is based on real Telegram admin/creator status in the Escalation Group — an authorized admin is anyone Telegram itself recognizes as an administrator or the creator of that group. A regular member replying is never treated as an authoritative source — see "Admin Responses."

A private Escalation Group never consumes a Watcher slot or counts toward your plan's Community allowance — see "Watcher Slots and Billing." It's strongly recommended for every Project (your dashboard shows a reminder when none is connected), but it's optional — a Watcher without one still moderates and answers normally, it just has nowhere to forward a question it can't answer or report what it did.