Question 1

What's the best polling interval for a Telegram RSS bot?

Accepted Answer

Half the feed's median publish gap, with a 60-second floor and a 24-hour ceiling. A blog that posts twice a week — every 6–12 hours; a news wire publishing 200 items a day — every 2–5 minutes. Always pair polling with conditional GETs (If-Modified-Since / If-None-Match) so unchanged polls return a 304 and don't count against most quotas.

Question 2

Can I send RSS items as photos in Telegram?

Accepted Answer

Yes — use sendPhoto when the item has a usable image (under 10 MB by URL, JPEG or PNG, landscape orientation reads best). For multiple images, sendMediaGroup ships up to 10 in one bundle. If the image is missing or oversized, fall back to sendMessage with disable_web_page_preview: false and let Telegram's Open Graph fetcher render the article preview.

Question 3

How do I deduplicate RSS items so I don't repost the same article twice?

Accepted Answer

Persist a set of seen (or Atom ) values to disk or a key-value store, and check membership before every send. Never dedupe on URL or title — feeds rotate tracking parameters and reuse titles for recap series. On every restart, reload the set; without persistence you'll re-ship the entire current feed window the next time the worker bounces.

Question 4

Can I add AI summarization to my Telegram RSS bot?

Accepted Answer

Yes, and it's usually worth it for high-volume feeds. Pipe each item's body through a model with a tight summarization prompt ("Two sentences. Lead with the concrete fact.") and ship the rewrite instead of the raw description. Watch the per-item cost — at 100 items a day a cheap model is a few dollars a month; an expensive one is a few hundred.

Question 5

Why does my Telegram RSS bot keep posting duplicates after a restart?

Accepted Answer

Because the seen-GUID set lives in memory and is cleared on restart. Move it to disk (SQLite, a flat JSON file, Redis — anything persistent) and load it on startup. While you're there, persist the ETag and Last-Modified headers from the last successful poll so the conditional-GET trick survives restarts too.

Question 6

Do I need a worker server to run RSS-to-Telegram, or is there a no-code option?

Accepted Answer

Both work. No-code routes (IFTTT, Zapier, Make, n8n, or a managed tool like Autogram) get you live in 5–30 minutes with no servers; native bot workers cost more setup time but more control and lower per-item cost at scale. The decision is mostly about how many feeds you'll run and how custom the formatting needs to be — see the comparison table in Step 2.