What You Need to Know
Telegram forum topics let you organize conversations within a single group or chat. With this update, OpenClaw treats each topic as a distinct context. You can configure topic-specific settings so that a "Work" topic uses a professional system prompt and has access to code-related skills, while a "Personal" topic uses a casual tone and home automation skills.
Per-topic dmPolicy means you can have stricter access control on sensitive topics. Your "Finance" topic can require explicit allowlist approval while your "General" topic uses standard pairing. This granularity was previously impossible — DM policy applied uniformly to the entire channel.
Skills and systemPrompt overrides per topic let you create specialized assistants without deploying multiple bots. One bot, one Telegram chat, but each topic behaves like a different agent with different capabilities. The assistant loads the topic-specific config when a message arrives and routes to the appropriate session.
Session routing is topic-aware, meaning context does not bleed between topics. A conversation about a work project in one topic stays isolated from a personal grocery list in another. Each topic maintains its own session history, compaction state, and memory writes.
Configuration is straightforward — add a topics map to your Telegram channel config with topic IDs as keys and override objects as values. Topic IDs can be found in Telegram's URL when navigating to a specific topic. Unmatched topics fall back to the channel's default config.