Telegram Admin Permissions: What Each Switch Allows

security The owner, the administrators, and everybody else

A large group has three levels rather than two. The owner is a single account with powers nobody else has: transferring the group, deleting it, and removing anybody including administrators. Administrators hold whichever permissions they were given. Members hold whatever the group's general settings allow.

Two properties of the middle level are worth knowing before touching anything.

An administrator can only pass on what they hold. Somebody who cannot ban people cannot grant that power to anybody else. This is what stops one over-generous promotion from spreading across your whole moderation team.

The owner is a single point of failure. If that account is lost, there is no procedure that restores control of the group, which is why the two-step verification in Step 008 is not optional for anybody running a community. Transferring ownership also requires that protection to have been in place for a while, so it cannot be arranged in an emergency.

rule The switches, and what each one really means

The third column is the point of the table. Most of these permissions do slightly more than their name suggests, and that surplus is where the surprises live.

Read the last row again, because it is the only one that is qualitatively different. Every other permission does damage you can repair. That one can hand your group to somebody else, and it does not require the person you trusted to have been untrustworthy — only for their account to have been taken, which is the scenario Step 008 exists for and which volunteers protect less carefully than owners do.

group Three bundles instead of nine decisions

Deciding switch by switch for each person produces an inconsistent set of administrators nobody can describe. It is easier to keep two or three shapes in your head and use them.

A moderator. Delete messages and restrict members, and nothing else. This is the role most volunteers actually want and it covers almost everything that needs doing daily. They cannot change the group, cannot promote anybody, and cannot be the cause of an irreversible event.

An organiser. Pinning, invitation links, video chats, topics. Somebody running events and onboarding who has no interest in moderation. Note that this bundle contains no destructive power at all.

A deputy. Everything except adding administrators. One person, chosen because the community needs somebody who can act while you are away. The single withheld switch is what keeps the arrangement recoverable.

Bots get their own version of this, and it is the strictest. A bot added as an administrator can do everything its permissions allow at machine speed, and whoever controls it is not necessarily the person who recommended it. Step 067 covers the subject; the rule that belongs here is that a bot should never hold the permission to add administrators, and should hold nothing else it does not visibly need.

touch_app Try it now — five minutes

Four steps, and the first one takes thirty seconds in any group you run.

1. Open your administrators list and check one thing Who holds the permission to add administrators. In most groups the answer is everybody, because nobody turned it off.
2. Remove it from anybody who is not you With the possible exception of one deputy, and even then consider whether they need it or simply have it.
3. Look at what the bots can do Bots appear in the same list. Anything with permissions beyond what its function requires should be trimmed, and Step 067 explains why this matters more than it sounds.
4. Give your moderators a title that matches their powers If somebody is labelled Support but cannot restrict anybody, either the title or the permissions is wrong, and members are the ones who discover which.

person_off The other half of the same screen

Permissions run in two directions and most people only ever use one. The screen that grants powers to an administrator has a counterpart that removes them from an individual member, and it is the tool moderators reach for least and should reach for most.

Opening a member's entry in the group gives you the same kind of switches in reverse: whether this person may send messages, media, links, or add anybody — and for how long. A few hours, a day, a week, or indefinitely.

That granularity matters because the alternative is binary. Faced with somebody posting too much, arguing badly, or dropping links into every conversation, an unpractised moderator has two options in mind: say nothing, or remove them. The first does nothing and the second is permanent, public in a small room, and generates a grievance somebody will be handling for a month.

A restriction is neither. Somebody who cannot post links for a week is still a member, still reading, still able to talk, and has received a clear and proportionate answer. Most of the time they simply stop doing the thing.

Two practical notes. Choose a period rather than indefinite, because an indefinite restriction is a ban that nobody will remember to lift. And tell the person, briefly and in a direct message — a silent restriction produces somebody who thinks the app is broken and asks in the group, which is worse for everybody than one sentence would have been.

group_add Adding moderators, and taking it back

Two parts of running a team are awkward socially and easy technically, which means they get avoided rather than done.

Promoting. The mistake is promoting somebody who is helpful. Being helpful is not the same as wanting to moderate, and a volunteer who accepted out of politeness will not act when it matters. Ask first, describe what you actually want them to do — usually "delete obvious spam and mute people who are shouting" — and give them the moderator bundle rather than everything. Somebody who later needs more can be given more in ten seconds.

Removing. Moderators go quiet. They change jobs, lose interest, or drift away from the subject, and their rights stay. A list of eleven administrators of whom four have not opened the group this year is not a strong team; it is four accounts whose security your community now depends on, for no benefit.

Removing rights from somebody inactive is not a judgement and is best framed as housekeeping: a short message saying you are tidying the list and they are welcome back any time. Almost everybody is relieved. The ones who are not were not inactive.

A useful cadence is to read the administrator list twice a year, alongside the device audit in Step 028. Both are the same kind of task — checking what still holds power that no longer needs it.

help Common questions at this stage