Trusted-User Approvals

Introduction

Trusted-User Approvals let group admins exempt specific, well-known members from automated content moderation while keeping the group's security protections active for everyone. Until now the only way a member could avoid the automated filters was to be a group admin — there was no middle ground for a long-standing contributor, a community partner, or an official announcement account that keeps tripping the spam, profanity, forward, or link filters during normal use.

With this feature, an admin marks a member as trusted. From that point on, the trusted member's messages skip the automated content checks — spam detection, badwords, sentiment/toxicity analysis, NSFW image scanning, and the content-restriction rules such as forwarded-message blocking, invite-link blocking, and blocked media types — so legitimate regulars stop being muted or deleted by false positives. Crucially, the security layer is never bypassed: antivirus/malware scanning and unauthorized-bot protection continue to apply to every member, trusted or not.

The feature is off by default and has no effect until an admin both enables it for the group and adds at least one trusted member, so turning it on never changes moderation for anyone who wasn't explicitly approved.

How It Works

Trusted-User Approvals are configured per group and evaluated per message, at the single point where the bot decides whether a message warrants a punishment.

When the group has approvals enabled and the message's author is on the group's approved list, the bot discards the automated content signals for that message and lets it through, while leaving the security signals intact. Because the decision happens where all detection results converge, the exemption is applied consistently across every content filter at once, and nothing special is needed in the individual scanners.

A trusted member who does nothing but post ordinary chat, links, forwards, and media will therefore never be muted or deleted by the content filters. But if that same member sends a file that the antivirus engine flags as malware, the bot still deletes it and applies the normal punishment — trust covers content moderation, not security.

What is bypassed vs. what still runs

For a trusted member, these automated content checks are skipped:

• Spam detection (the machine-learning spam classifier and spam-pattern engine)
• Badwords / profanity filtering
• Sentiment and toxicity analysis (toxic, threatening, insulting, or profane language)
• NSFW image, video, GIF, and sticker scanning
• Language enforcement
• Content-restriction rules — forwarded-message blocking, invite-link blocking, and blocked media types (no-text, no-audio, no-video, and similar)

These security protections continue to apply to trusted members, exactly as they do for everyone else:

• Antivirus / malware scanning of files (an infected file is still deleted and punished)
• Unauthorized-bot protection (a bot that should be kicked is still kicked)
• Malicious-link / URL scanning continues to run on trusted members' messages

This split is deliberate. Content moderation is about taste and community norms, where a trusted regular has earned the benefit of the doubt. Security is about protecting the whole group from harm, where no exemption is appropriate — a trusted account can be compromised, and you do not want a whitelist to become a channel for malware.

Configuration

Setting up Trusted-User Approvals takes two steps, in two different places in the group admin panel:

1. Enable the feature. Open your group in the dashboard and go to the group's settings. Under the Basic Protection tab, turn on Trusted-User Approvals. This sets the group's set_approvals flag. While it is off (the default), nothing changes for anyone.
2. Add trusted members. Switch to the Advanced tab and use the trusted-users manager. Enter a member's @handle or numeric id (they must already be a member of the group) and add them to the list. The manager shows everyone currently trusted, and each row has a remove control.

You can also manage the list entirely from inside Telegram with bot commands (see below). The panel and the commands operate on the same underlying list.

Managing trusted users from Telegram

All three commands are admin-only; a non-admin who runs them is refused. Approvals are scoped to a single group — approving someone in one group has no effect in any other.

• /approve — reply to a message from the member you want to trust (or provide their @handle or numeric id) to add them to the group's approved list.
• /unapprove — remove a member from the approved list, so automated content moderation applies to them again.
• /approved — list the members who are currently trusted in the group.

Timing note: an approval or revocation made with a bot command takes effect immediately. A change made from the admin panel is applied to the same list, but it can take up to a few minutes to affect moderation of new messages, because the bot caches approval status briefly. If you need an instant change, use the bot command.

When to use it

Trusted-User Approvals are most useful for:

• Long-standing, high-trust community members whose normal participation occasionally trips the content filters.
• Official or partner accounts (for example, an announcements account) that post frequently — often with forwards and links — and should not be subject to automated content moderation.
• Staff or volunteers who help run the community but are not full group admins.

Use it sparingly and deliberately. Every trusted member is one whose content is no longer being checked, so the list should be small and reviewed periodically with /approved.

Best practices

• Keep the list short. Approve individuals you know, not whole categories of people.
• Prefer /approve as a reply to one of the member's messages — it is the least error-prone way to target the right account.
• Review the list periodically with /approved and remove members who no longer need the exemption.
• Remember that forward and invite-link blocking do not apply to trusted members. If you rely on those as anti-raid tooling, do not approve accounts you are not confident about.

Security note

Trust is revocable and should be revoked the moment it is misused. Because a trusted member's account could be compromised or handed to someone else, the bot intentionally keeps antivirus scanning and unauthorized-bot protection active for trusted members — the exemption never extends to security. If a trusted account starts behaving badly, run /unapprove (or remove them from the panel) to immediately restore full automated moderation for that member.

Frequently asked questions

Does a trusted member still get scanned for malware? Yes. Antivirus/malware scanning runs on every file from every member, including trusted ones, and an infected file is still removed and punished. Trust only exempts a member from content moderation, not from security scanning.

Do forwarded messages and invite links still get blocked for trusted members? No. Those are content-restriction rules, so they are bypassed for trusted members along with the other content filters. If forward or invite-link blocking is part of your anti-raid setup, keep that in mind before approving an account.

Is anyone trusted by default? No. The feature is off until an admin enables it, and even then only members explicitly added to the approved list are exempt. Enabling the toggle with an empty list changes nothing.

Can a regular member approve someone? No. Only group admins can run /approve//unapprove or use the panel's trusted-users manager.

Does approving someone in one group carry over to my other groups? No. Approvals are per-group. You approve a member within the specific group where you want the exemption to apply.