Problem, approach, result.
Once a Telegram community grows past a few thousand members, it stops being a chat group and starts being a small operation — moderation queues, spam waves, raids, growth tracking, role assignments, broadcasts. Telegram's native admin tools cap out around 'pin a message.' Existing bots solved one problem at a time; nobody had built the operational layer that 24/7 communities actually need.
We treated Telegram as the substrate and built the product above it. Skelda is a multi-tenant ops layer: each community gets a bot for in-chat enforcement plus a web dashboard for analytics, RBAC, and configuration. We built the anti-spam engine first because it's the hardest and most visible — sub-second latency, classifier-based, with fallback heuristics. RBAC was next, because once a community has a mod team, ownership of permissions is non-negotiable.
Skelda now runs in 1,000+ communities covering more than 4M members. Spam is removed in under a second, with zero manual triage in steady state. Mod teams have granular RBAC in place of a single all-or-nothing admin role. Owners can see growth, retention, and engagement in a dashboard. Raids that used to take down communities are auto-detected and locked down in seconds.
The interface in production.
The live event log + RBAC view — every action the bot takes is recorded, attributable, and queryable. Mod teams operate with structured, auditable permissions.
skelda / @CryptoBuilders — live event log + team rbac
What we built.
The actual surfaces, services, and capabilities that shipped.
Anti-spam engine
BotSub-second classifier-based enforcement. Removes phishing, raids, and noise without manual triage.
- ›Classifier + heuristic stack
- ›Sub-second message → action
- ›Captcha gating for new joins
- ›Raid detection + auto-lockdown
Owner & mod dashboard
WebPer-community web console for analytics, configuration, broadcasts, and team management.
- ›Growth + engagement charts
- ›Bot config + rule tuning
- ›Broadcast scheduler
- ›Searchable event log
Team access control
RBACProper roles for mod teams. Audit log of every elevated action, attributable to a real account.
- ›Owner / admin / mod / service roles
- ›Per-permission granular control
- ›Action audit log
- ›API key management
Analytics layer
DataGrowth, retention, engagement, and content trends — across one or many communities for portfolio owners.
- ›Cohort retention
- ›Engagement heatmaps
- ›Cross-community portfolio view
- ›Exportable reports
From brief to live.
“We were losing hours every day to manual moderation and the occasional raid would take the community down for an evening. Now the bot handles it before we notice. The dashboard told us things about our growth that we didn't know to ask.”