You can now post a listing straight from Telegram

The form on the site asks you to sit at a computer, type, wait for an email and open a link. From a phone, fewer than half get to the end. So we built the same thing inside the messenger where our readers already spend the day.

How it works

Open @onlyway_news_bot and send /new. Then ten short steps, most of them a tap: section, offering or looking for, title, description, price, city, photos, how to reach you, WhatsApp, and the language people should use with you. At the end the bot shows the whole listing and asks you to confirm.

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After “Publish” the listing appears on the board at once. You get a private link that lets you change the text or withdraw it yourself, at any time — no email to the editors, no waiting.

Why there is no email confirmation

On the website we send a link by email to check that the address is real and a person is behind it. In the bot, Telegram has already done that: the account is tied to a phone number. Repeating the check by email adds nothing, so a listing from the bot publishes straight away.

Your Telegram handle is added to the contacts automatically so a reader has somewhere to write. A phone number or an email is what you supply at the last step.

What the bot checks and corrects

A listing from the bot goes through exactly the same review as one from the website. These are not our fussy rules but requirements of UK law, and the publisher answers for what is published, not the person who wrote the advert.

• Conditions barred by the Equality Act 2010 — “no DSS”, ethnic preferences, age or sex limits without a lawful basis — are removed from the text. The bot tells you exactly what it changed.
• Immigration services without an Immigration Advice Authority registration number and financial promotions without an FCA number go to an editor.
• Charging a jobseeker for finding work is prohibited by the Conduct of Employment Agencies Regulations 2003 — we do not publish those.
• Phone numbers and emails inside the text are moved to the contact field, where they are revealed on a tap and cannot be harvested from the page.

What it costs

Nothing. A listing is free, runs for 60 days and is renewed through the same link. We take no money to bump a listing up the page and we do not sell position in the board’s results — only advertising is paid here, and it is marked ADV with a number — the terms are on their own page.

Photos

Send them straight from your phone’s gallery, up to five. We resize each one and strip the metadata — including the coordinates a phone writes into the file by default. Listings with a picture get considerably more views than those without.

The full board rules are on their own page. If something does not work, or the bot behaves oddly, write to us: info@onlyway.news.