--- title: "How to filter client requests in Telegram groups: templates" description: "Why a keyword list catches colleagues’ ads, what to put in a monitoring instruction, and three templates you can adapt to your own work." url: https://pingfinch.com/en/articles/how-to-write-a-telegram-monitoring-instruction lang: en author: "Pingfinch" published: 2026-10-06T09:00:00+02:00 --- # How to filter client requests in Telegram groups: templates A monitoring instruction is a plain-language description: who writes the message you want, what they need and what doesn’t fit you. The Pingfinch bot asks about anything unclear and shows how it understood you. *Illustration of a chat with the Pingfinch bot* > Looking for people who need a transfer to or from Lisbon airport. A date or price isn’t required. I don’t need drivers offering rides, parcels or people looking for driving work. > > **AI summary — I will look for:** > - People looking for a driver or transfer to or from Lisbon airport > - Requests without a date or price fit > - Doesn’t fit: drivers offering rides, parcels, people looking for work > > **AI summary:** Three people need a transfer from Lisbon airport to Cascais > **Matching request:** Need a transfer from Lisbon airport to Cascais tomorrow evening, there are three of us. ## Why does a keyword list catch the wrong messages? *Four messages with the word “website”* > **Member:** The contact form on our website stopped working. Who can fix it this week? > **Studio:** We build and fix any website, fast and affordable. DM us. > **Member:** What’s the easiest way to make a website for my shop myself? > **Member:** Thanks, the website is fixed, we’re no longer looking. 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. **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. **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. **What doesn’t fit** — Provider offers, people looking for work, sales, related services you don’t take. 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. > **Freelancer or small web studio** Find messages from business owners or companies looking for an external freelancer or studio to fix, update or maintain an existing website or online shop: contact and booking forms, mobile layout, slow pages, payments. Requests for a quote or a recommended developer fit. A missing budget, deadline or platform doesn’t rule a message out. Don’t fit: full-time or in-house roles, people looking for work, courses, designers and studios offering their services, new sites built from scratch. > **Airport driver** Find messages where someone is looking for a driver or transfer to or from Lisbon airport, or asks for a recommendation. Requests without a date, price or number of passengers fit. Don’t fit: drivers offering rides, parcels and freight, people looking for driving work. > **Cleaner** Find messages from people looking for someone to clean a flat, house or small office, one-off or regular, including after renovation or before moving out. Requests to recommend a cleaner fit, with or without a date or price. Don’t fit: cleaning companies offering their services, people looking for cleaning work, sales of equipment and products, upholstery cleaning. ## 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](https://pingfinch.com/en/articles/how-to-choose-telegram-groups-for-service-requests) ## What doesn’t the filter do? > **Limits of the selection** When in doubt, the filter rejects a message; there is no “review manually” flag. Messages that make sense only with the conversation above them don’t get through. AI makes mistakes in both directions, so open the original through the link before you reply. 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](https://pingfinch.com/en/how-it-works) - [Pricing](https://pingfinch.com/en/access-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.