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Why an edited clone arrives as plain text

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How Telegram stores bold and links, why editing the text moves them, and why losing italics beats misplacing a link.

Why an edited clone arrives as plain text

Bold, italics and links in Telegram are not part of the text. They are stored separately, as a list: «from this character, for this many characters, bold», «from here, a link to there». The text itself is plain.

What happens when you edit

Change the text — insert a word, remove a phrase, replace someone else's link with yours — and every offset after that point now points somewhere else. A link lands on a random part of a sentence; half a word turns bold.

The link case is the serious one. It does not merely look wrong: it takes the reader somewhere other than where it promises. That is worse than no link.

How this is resolved

  • Text unchanged — formatting copies across intact.
  • Text appended at the end — earlier offsets did not move, so formatting still copies.
  • Text edited in the middle — the post goes out as plain text.

The third case looks like a loss and is a deliberate choice: losing italics is more honest than misplacing a link. A reader who clicks and lands somewhere unexpected does not click twice.

The practical consequence

If formatting matters to you, set the cloner not to edit text at all: no link replacement, no stripping of mentions. If edits are necessary, accept that some posts will be plain, and decide which you care about more.

On the edits themselves — removing other people's links.

Emoji and offsets

The same mechanism breaks something else: characters are not counted the way a person sees them, and one emoji occupies two positions. It is what breaks story mentions too — explained there.

How Neurogram does this

Everything above is manual work that runs into the number of hours in a day. Neurogram does it on your own accounts and without you: it collects channels and audiences, writes comments and replies with a language model, and keeps limits and quiet hours so the accounts survive. See pricing or look at your case.

Topic: Channel growth

More on this topic: The tool for this

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