What is a Watcher?

A Watcher is an individual Virtual Moderator you deploy into your Telegram Community. Treat a Watcher as its own configured identity — a name, a persona, a role, and its own settings — rather than a generic, interchangeable bot instance.

A Watcher can: join ordinary community conversation, hold a consistent persona and speaking style, answer questions grounded in your project's knowledge, enforce your moderation rules, identify and act on spam/scam/prohibited content, warn users in natural language, publish scheduled content where configured, recognize when it doesn't have a verified answer, escalate that question to your private admin group, relay the verified answer back once it has one, and (optionally) turn an admin's approved answer into reusable project knowledge.

Everything above is opt-in and configured per Watcher — nothing is on by default, and a Watcher only does what its Watcher Record actually configures it to do. See "Watcher Records" for the full list of what's configurable.

A Telegram community can have more than one Watcher deployed at once, each with a different role and persona — see "Multi-Watcher Communities."

For example, one community might run Mr Pres (Role: Community Lead, Persona: friendly and confident — member engagement, general project questions, moderation, community guidance) alongside Ms VP (Role: Community Support, Persona: warm and approachable — answering questions, welcoming members, support discussions). These are illustrative names, not required defaults — you name and configure your own Watchers.

Creating a Watcher and deploying it are two separate steps — see "Watcher Profiles vs Deployments vs Slots" for the full relationship.