Auto-Detect & Privacy Mode

If you paste a contract into a group and Prysm does nothing, you’re almost certainly hitting Telegram’s privacy mode. This page explains what privacy mode is, why it blocks paste detection, and how to fix it. The fix lives entirely on Telegram’s side — there’s nothing for Prysm to toggle on its end.

What you’ll see when it’s broken

You add Prysm to a group, paste a known contract address into the chat, and… nothing happens. No preview card in Manual Mode. No silent capture in Silent Auto-Track (run /list afterwards and the token isn’t there).

What still works:

• Slash commands like /list, /add <ca>, /og, /settings, /prysm.
• Replies to the bot’s own messages.
• Tapping the inline buttons under any card the bot has posted.

If commands work but pastes don’t, that’s the signature of privacy mode. It isn’t a bug in Prysm — Telegram is filtering the message before the bot ever sees it.

Why this happens

By default, Telegram puts every bot into privacy mode when it joins a group. In privacy mode, the bot only receives messages that are explicitly addressed to it: slash commands, replies to its messages, and @username mentions. Plain text — including a pasted contract address with no command and no mention — is invisible to the bot.

Prysm’s paste-detection runs on the regular text stream. If Telegram doesn’t deliver the message, there’s nothing for the bot to scan. The welcome message Prysm posts when it joins a group flags this directly:

👆 Add me as admin to enable contract detection!

That line is the bot reminding you that privacy mode is on by default and one of the two fixes below is required before auto-detection will work.

The two fixes

There are exactly two ways to bypass privacy mode. Either one works on its own — you don’t need both.

Fix	Scope	Best for
Promote the bot to admin	This group only	One group, simplest fix
Disable privacy in BotFather	Every group the bot is in	Many groups, no admin grant

Promote to admin is per-group and immediate — the moment Prysm becomes a group admin, Telegram lifts privacy mode for that chat, regardless of the BotFather setting. The trade-off is that you’re giving the bot admin status in your group.

Disable privacy in BotFather is a one-time, account-wide change. Once flipped, the bot sees every message in every group it’s in, present and future. The trade-off is broader reach: if you’d rather keep the bot’s access scoped per group, the admin path is tighter.

Fix 1: Promote the bot to admin

1. Open the group in Telegram.

2. Tap the group name at the top to open group info.

3. Tap Administrators (on some clients: Manage group → Administrators).

4. Tap Add Admin and pick @PrysmTokenTrackerBot from the member list.

5. Leave the default permissions as they are — Prysm doesn’t need anything beyond admin status to bypass privacy mode. You can uncheck most boxes if you want to keep its powers minimal.

6. Confirm. The change takes effect immediately.

Fix 2: Disable privacy mode in BotFather

This path requires you to be the bot’s owner — i.e. the Telegram account that originally created the bot via BotFather. If someone else hosts Prysm for you, ask them to do it, or use Fix 1 instead.

1. Open a chat with @BotFather in Telegram.

2. Send /setprivacy.

3. BotFather will list your bots. Pick the one you want to update.

4. BotFather replies with the current setting and two options: Enable and Disable. Tap Disable.

5. BotFather confirms with “Success! The new status is: DISABLED.”

Note

After flipping the BotFather setting, remove the bot from the group and re-add it. Telegram caches the privacy state at join time for some clients, so an existing membership may keep behaving as if privacy is still on until the bot rejoins.

Verifying the fix

Pick a contract address you know is valid on a chain Prysm supports and paste it into the group on its own line.

• Silent Auto-Track group: the chat stays quiet — that’s the point of silent mode. Run /list afterwards. If the token appears in the group’s auto-track list, the fix is in.
• Manual Mode group: a preview card with the token’s symbol, price, market cap, and an add button should appear within a second or two of the paste.

If neither happens, double-check that the bot is actually an admin (group info → Administrators) or that BotFather reports privacy as DISABLED for the right bot.

What does and doesn’t need this fix

Feature	Needs fix?
Slash commands (/add, /list, /og, /settings, etc.)	No
Replies to bot messages	No
Inline button taps on bot cards	No
Paste-detection auto-track (Silent Auto-Track)	Yes
Manual-mode paste previews	Yes
Bulk paste (multiple contracts in one message)	Yes

Anything that’s already addressed to the bot — a slash command, a reply, a mention — flows through regardless of privacy mode. The fix only matters for the cases where you want Prysm to react to plain-text pastes that don’t mention it.

DM is unaffected

Privacy mode is a group-only concept. In a private chat with the bot, Telegram delivers every message you send — there’s no filter to bypass. Pasting a contract into your DM with Prysm always works, even on a fresh install with no settings touched.

Where to next

Silent Auto-Track What the bot does with pastes once it can actually see them.

Manual Mode The visible-preview alternative — every paste surfaces a card.

Add to a Group Walk through joining a group and the welcome message.