I’m building a Telegram bot using Python and running into issues with handling user interactions. My bot asks users questions and waits for their replies, but things get messy when multiple people use the bot at the same time.
Here’s what happens: User A gets asked a question and the bot waits for an answer. While waiting, User B starts talking to the bot or asks something else. The bot gets confused about which response belongs to which user.
I know that Telegram’s update system works with offset numbers. When you fetch updates, you send an offset value. Any update with a lower number gets marked as processed and removed from the queue. The tricky part is that these numbers go in order, so marking update 5 as handled also removes updates 1 through 4.
What’s the cleanest Python approach to track which user should answer what question while keeping everything organized?
Had this exact problem six months ago. Fixed it with conversation handlers using user-specific sessions. Each message gets matched to a user session via chat_id - that’s where you store all the context about where they are in the flow. The trick is processing each update independently. Don’t worry about other users. User A sends something? Look up their session, check if they’re in the right state, update their progress. User B has their own session running separately. I keep sessions in memory and clean up inactive ones after 30 minutes. Makes debugging way easier too since you can check any user’s state individually.
definitely! u can use a dict to manage user states. just be careful with timeouts and folks jumping in. itll really help keep track of whos responding to what. best of luck!
Had the same issue when I built my bot’s conversation flow. Here’s what worked for me: create a state manager that tracks each user ID and where they are in the conversation. Every user gets their own state object with their current step, what input they should send next, and any temporary data. The trick is treating every user interaction separately. When an update comes in, grab the user ID first, check their state, then handle their message based on that. So User A can be on question 3 while User B just started question 1. I also set states to expire after 10 minutes of inactivity to keep things clean. This makes offset handling way easier since you’re not juggling multiple users - just process each update based on that user’s current state.