How to protect a Telegram bot from spam?

Question

PHP

There was a problem with my telegram bot, one of its users decided to spam it with some software - it turned out quite successfully, the bot lay down. How can you implement an anti-spam system so that when you try to send, let's say more than one message in 5 seconds, a stop message arrives: There must be a pause of 5 seconds between messages! You may be blocked for continuing to spam. If the user ignored the warning and sent, let's say, more than 5 messages without a pause, then his account, which I store in the database, acquired the status - Blocked, and the bot checked the user's status and if it was blocked, it simply exited via exit(), but it doesn't matter, the main thing is how do I store the remaining time and so on? Nothing comes to mind..

Answer 1

To do this, you need to keep track of the user_id and timestamp of the last message in the bot.
You can create a table in the database with 2 columns: user_id (unique), last_message_time.
When a new message arrives from a user, you get the last_message_time for the current user_id and see how many seconds have passed between the last message and the current time.
If less than 5 seconds have passed, then send a warning and consider that there was a violation from user_id, if more than 5 seconds have passed, then we consider the message valid and do not forget to update last_message_time for user_id.
The only way to spam the bot in this case is to send messages from many different accounts, which is already much more difficult for an attacker.