I’m working on a project to archive messages from a Telegram group using a bot. Right now I’m manually fetching updates through the browser and saving them to a text file. I use the offset parameter to get newer messages each time.
But I’ve noticed something weird. Sometimes when I fetch updates after using an offset, there’s a big jump in the update IDs. Like if the last ID was 1500, the next batch might start at 1540 or even 1553. I can’t find the messages for those missing IDs anywhere.
Is this normal behavior? Am I doing something wrong with the offset? Or could there be another explanation for these gaps?
I’m worried I might be missing important messages. Has anyone else run into this issue or know how to fix it? Any help would be awesome!
hey, i noticed it too. telegram assigns update ids in chunks so u might see gaps. if u always use the correct offset, you’re all good. if not, try a proper library—it handles these issues better.
I’ve encountered similar issues while working on Telegram bots for message archiving. From my experience, those gaps in update IDs are actually quite normal and don’t necessarily mean you’re missing messages.
Telegram’s update system is designed to handle high volumes of data across multiple servers. Sometimes, blocks of update IDs are pre-allocated to different servers or reserved for specific types of updates. This can result in those jumps you’re seeing.
As long as you’re consistently using the highest update_id + 1 as your next offset, you should be capturing all relevant messages for your group. If you’re really concerned, you could double-check by occasionally fetching updates with a lower offset, but in my projects, I’ve found this isn’t usually necessary.
One tip: consider implementing a proper bot using a library like python-telegram-bot instead of manual browser fetches. It’ll handle a lot of these intricacies for you and make the archiving process much smoother.
I’ve dealt with this issue in my Telegram bot projects. Those gaps in update IDs are actually normal and don’t indicate missing messages. Telegram’s system pre-allocates ID ranges to different servers for efficiency, which causes these jumps.
As long as you’re using the last received update_id + 1 as your next offset, you’re not missing anything. The messages between those IDs simply don’t exist for your bot.
If you’re still concerned, you could periodically fetch updates with a slightly lower offset as a safeguard. However, in my experience, this rarely catches anything new.
For a more robust solution, consider using a dedicated Telegram bot library. It’ll handle these quirks automatically and simplify your archiving process significantly.