How to filter client requests in Telegram groups: templates

Why does a keyword list catch the wrong messages?

Only the first is a job. Negative keywords help little, because they drop the whole message: exclude “hiring” to get rid of vacancies, and “hiring a freelancer to fix our booking page” goes with them. Pingfinch selects by the meaning of your description and can usually tell such messages apart.

What goes into an instruction?

1. 1

   Who writes

   A person looking for someone to do the work or asking for a recommendation. Providers offering the same service belong in the exclusions.

2. 2

   What work

   What you do and what you don’t. Name a place only if it is part of the service: a route, an airport, remote work.

3. 3

   What doesn’t fit

   Provider offers, people looking for work, sales, related services you don’t take.

4. 4

   Incomplete messages

   The bot doesn’t turn details you didn’t mention, such as a date, budget or address, into conditions. A line saying that such requests still fit is optional, but it makes this explicit and shows up in the summary.

Write only about what the message text can show. The filter can’t check your free Thursdays or the languages you can work in. Pingfinch also removes web links, email addresses and phone numbers in international format (starting with +) from messages before the check, so don’t rely on them either.

Which templates can you start from?

The templates are examples: take the closest one and change it to fit your work.

Where do exclusions break the selection?

Describe each exclusion as a situation. “No hiring” removes full-time vacancies and “hiring a freelancer for a project” alike, while “full-time or in-house roles” removes only the vacancies. You can leave out “no ads”: an instruction that looks for clients already rules out providers’ ads.

How do you check that the bot understood you?

Read the summary the bot shows before the search starts. It lists the conditions and exclusions as the bot understood them, and a mismatch is easier to catch there than later in your notifications.

Each notification carries a short reason. If unwanted notifications keep arriving with the same reason, add that situation to the exclusions and change nothing else, so you can see whether it helped. If nothing arrives at all, first check whether people in your groups post such requests.

• How to find and choose Telegram groups

What doesn’t the filter do?

You can start free in the Pingfinch bot: create a subscription, add public groups and describe what you’re looking for. The terms after the free period are on the Pricing page.

• How Pingfinch works
• Pricing

FAQ

Do I need to list every word form and synonym?

No. The selection looks at what a message means, so “site”, “website” and “web page” don’t need to be listed one by one.

Why didn’t “Can anyone recommend someone?” arrive?

Without the conversation above it, nobody can tell what work the message is about. The filter rejects such messages under any instruction.

One instruction for several services, or several subscriptions?

Put different services in different subscriptions. The subscription name in the notification shows which instruction matched, and the reason shows what it took for a request.