Moderating a Telegram group by hand is a treadmill: delete a link dump, remove three crypto ads, ban a bot swarm — and the next morning it starts again. The good news: most of the routine can be automated for free, and the setup takes minutes.
Everything above is manual. Spam works by exhausting the admins: it arrives at 4 AM, in ten languages, in swarms. No volunteer moderator survives that schedule. This is the point where a moderation bot earns its place — it does not sleep, does not take offense, and deletes in the seconds between a spam post and any member seeing it.
Check four things before adding anything: it must respect your members' language and script (not flag transliteration or national letters as spam), it must have a free tier that is not a trial, it must keep an event log so you can audit every action, and it must let you unban with one click when you make a mistake. We built @user_ban_bot to those four rules — interface in 7 languages, core protection free — but whichever bot you pick, check those four boxes.
Add the bot as an administrator with the rights to delete messages and ban members. Typical spam disappears on its own; fine rules live in its settings panel. If you run several groups, settings can be applied to all of them at once.
Free moderation is not a myth — it is a bot plus disciplined admin rights. Automate the deleting, review the log weekly, and moderation stops being a second job.