How Do You Forward Messages From a Telegram Forum Topic?

A topic behaves like its own chat

When Topics are enabled, each room has its own message flow. A message published in one room does not belong to any other, and a rule watching room A correctly ignores everything posted in room B. That is the behaviour you want — it is what lets you split a busy group into separate streams — but it also means the room has to be chosen deliberately, both as a source and as a destination.

Using one room as the source

Choosing the group instead of the room is the most common mistake, and it fails in the direction that is hardest to notice: the rule delivers far more than you expected, or, when combined with filters, nothing at all.

1. Create a rule and pick the source. Rooms appear by name, listed under their group.
2. Pick the room you actually want, not the group, unless you really do want everything from every room.
3. Pick the destination as usual: it can be a channel, a group, a room inside another group, or a chat with yourself.
4. Save. From that moment, only what is published in that room is delivered.

Delivering into a room

A room can be the destination as well. Messages arrive inside that room rather than in the group at large, which is what makes it possible to keep several streams tidy in one place: one room per source channel, all inside a single group, instead of a channel per source.

Two things to check when a room is the destination: that whoever posts there has permission to post in that specific room, and that the room has not been closed. A closed topic refuses new messages while the group itself stays perfectly healthy, which is exactly the kind of external cause that makes a destination look empty for no visible reason.

The General room is a room too

Every forum group has a General room, and it counts as a topic like the others. Messages published there do not belong to any of the named rooms, so a rule watching a named room will not see them — correctly.

The practical consequence: if what you want is General, choose General explicitly. Choosing the group when you meant General, or the other way round, is the second most common way to end up with a rule that looks silent while working exactly as told.

Finding the identifier of a room

You do not need it to set up a rule, because rooms are picked from a list by name. If you need it anyway, open the topic in Telegram Web and read the address bar: it carries the group first, then the room. The page on finding a Telegram chat identifier goes through the details, including what the -100 prefix means.

Bringing across what a room published before

Importing past messages works on a room as well, and it brings across only that room, not the whole group. It shares the same caps and the same warning as any bulk import, which are covered on their own page: bulk sending is the riskiest thing you can ask a Telegram account to do.

When a topic rule looks silent

• The room simply has not had a new message since the rule was switched on. Post a test message in it and watch the destination.
• The rule is watching the group, or a different room. Open it and confirm which one.
• The destination room is closed, or posting there is not permitted.
• A filter on the rule is dropping everything. Switch the filters off, test, then re-enable them one at a time.