Beergress IGN Beergress IGNA Telegram bot that helps Ingress players organize informal beer meetups — "beergress" — and publish them to their Telegram groups.
Two players who know each other in the game often don't recognize each other on Telegram: a Telegram username and an Ingress In-Game Name (IGN) are usually different, and nothing normally connects the two. Beergress IGN treats that mapping as something you control: you can optionally save your IGN once, and the bot will use it everywhere instead of your Telegram handle.
The bot has to be added to a group manually first — Telegram doesn't let bots join groups on their own. Once @beergressign_bot is a member of your group, anyone in that group can post a meetup for it by sending:
/beergress [location]
The location is optional free text (e.g. /beergress Barcelona).
The bot posts an announcement in the group with a tap-to-copy line ready to paste
elsewhere (such as the Ingress community site), a participant count, and two buttons:
JOIN and LEAVE. The organizer is automatically counted
as a participant of their own event.
Anyone in the group can tap JOIN on a posted meetup to be counted in, or LEAVE to back out again. Whichever name the bot already knows for you (your saved IGN, or your Telegram username as a fallback) is used automatically — there's no extra prompt, so joining is instant even for people who have never talked to the bot privately.
If the name showing up for you isn't right, that's what your IGN is for — see below.
Telegram only lets a bot message a user privately after that user has started a chat with
it, so the bot never interrupts a group to ask for your IGN. Instead, open a private chat
with @beergressign_bot and send
/start (or /edit later on) to set or change it. Once saved, it's
automatically used the next time you organize or join a meetup — and it's also
applied retroactively to any of your meetups from the last 24 hours, so a fix you make
right after joining still shows up correctly.
/beergress [location]/start/check/edit/delete/useign <IGN>/help
/beergress only works inside a group; /start,
/help, /check, /edit, /delete and
/useign only work in a private chat with the bot.
The bot only stores what it needs to run meetups: your Telegram user id, the IGN you choose to save (if any), and the meetups you've organized or joined. Deleting your saved IGN also breaks the link between your Telegram account and any past meetups — the names already shown stay as they were, but the bot can no longer tell they were you.