Tgcli Topics

tgcli-topics

A specialized skill to discover and list Telegram forum topics. Standard tgcli is great for flat-chat history, but it does not expose forum-topic listing. This skill bridges the gap by converting the tgcli session to a Telethon session and querying the MTProto Client API directly.

Ready-to-run entrypoint

Use the wrapper below as the default command. It bootstraps a local Telethon virtualenv in ~/.tgcli/venv, installs telethon if needed, converts the tgcli session to a Telethon .session file when missing or stale, and then runs topic discovery.

# List topics for all dialogs (Markdown format)
python3 scripts/tgcli-topics.py --all --markdown

# List topics for specific peers
python3 scripts/tgcli-topics.py --peers 123456789,987654321

# Output as JSON
python3 scripts/tgcli-topics.py --all --json

Helper scripts

• scripts/tgcli-topics.py is the only entrypoint agents should need.
• scripts/convert-session.py remains available for forced/manual conversion.
• scripts/discover-topics.py remains available as the lower-level discovery helper.

Notes

• First run may take a moment because the wrapper may create a venv and install telethon.
• Topic discovery paginates, so chats with more than 100 topics are handled correctly.
• --include-flat includes dialogs that do not have forum topics, which is useful for audits.
• For topic message reads in bot DMs, use a Telethon client with receive_updates=False. In practice, isolating each bot DM in its own client pass avoids update-decoding issues while reading replies.