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'.
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.
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.
- Clone repository.
- Run
npm installinto repository directory. - Run
node index.jsor create the systemd.servicebot-getid.service.