Your daily horoscope in Telegram: how the Lunonis bot works

What the bot does

Lunonis has a public Telegram bot. Once you start it, it sends you a daily horoscope for your Sun sign, written from the real sky of the day, at the hour you pick. It sends at most one message a day, and it talks to you only in a private chat.

The daily message carries a title, the opening lines of the horoscope and two buttons: one opens the full page on the site, the other the forecast for your personal month. The same horoscope is on the site, in the same language, if you prefer to read it there.

If the day’s text is not ready when your hour comes, the bot tries again a little later instead of sending an empty message.

It is a Sun-sign horoscope, which means it speaks in general terms to everyone born under your sign. That is useful as a daily prompt, and a limit worth knowing about. Further down you will see the one personal feature the bot has.

How to start

You need Telegram and about a minute.

1. Open t.me/lunolisBot in Telegram and press Start.
2. Choose your Sun sign from the twelve buttons. If you are not sure of it, the free birth chart calculator shows it from your birth date.
3. The bot answers with the sign, the hour and the time zone it will use. From then on the horoscope arrives on its own.

Pressing Start again later does not create a second subscription. The bot keeps one per chat and simply switches it back on, so it is safe to use after a stop.

The bot writes in the language of your Telegram app when Lunonis has it, and in English otherwise. If you arrive from a link on the site, it may already know your sign and language, and then it skips the question.

The commands

Everything the bot does can be reached with a short command. Type it in the chat or pick it from the command menu.

• /today shows today’s horoscope for your sign, with its sections.
• /week and /month show the horoscope for the week and for the month.
• /keydays lists your next personal key days, when you have them.
• /settings changes your topics, the hour, the time zone and the sign.
• /shop opens the Lunonis shop inside Telegram. Our guide to the shop in Telegram explains it.
• /stop switches the messages off.

The weekly and monthly texts also come with buttons to the full page, to your personal month and to the birth chart book. Before you press Start, the bot only asks you to send /start first.

Choosing the hour and the time zone

The daily message arrives at a local hour. You can pick 07:00, 08:00, 09:00, 12:00, 18:00 or 21:00. Open /settings, tap Change time and choose one. Eight in the morning is the usual starting point.

Because the hour is local, the bot needs your time zone. If you came from the free chart on the site, it takes the zone of your browser. If you pressed Start from a plain link, the bot begins with UTC, so open /settings, tap Change time zone and choose the nearest city. The list is short, a handful of cities across the main regions rather than every zone, so pick the closest one.

Personal key days

A Sun-sign horoscope cannot know where your Moon is or where Saturn falls in your own chart. The bot has one feature that does: key days. A key day is a date when a planet in the sky meets a point in your birth chart. On such a day the daily message says “Today is one of your key days” and describes the transit in plain words, instead of the general horoscope.

To get key days, open your free chart on Lunonis, enter your birth details and choose Telegram in the notification options there. The site hands you over to the bot, you press Start, and the bot has your chart’s dates. From then on /keydays lists the next ones. Without a chart, /keydays simply says that key days are worked out from your birth chart and points you to the free one.

What the bot stores

The short list is below. It is the same list the privacy policy gives, in its section on notifications.

• Your chat id, the number Telegram uses for your private chat with the bot.
• Your sign and language, and the hour and time zone you chose.
• Your topics: the daily horoscope, key days and a note when an order is ready. You can switch them on and off in /settings.
• Three moments: when you agreed, when the last message was sent and when you stopped.

Key days need more. The bot then keeps the birth details of your chart, but only sealed: locked with a secret key that stays on our server, never written in the clear, and without your name. They are kept so that the dates can be worked out again every so often.

A log of the messages sent keeps ids and codes only, and it is deleted after 90 days. When you stop, your subscription is deleted 90 days later.

Stopping, and coming back

Send /stop and the messages end at once. Blocking the bot has the same effect: when Telegram refuses a delivery, the bot turns you off. If you linked your Lunonis account, you can also turn it off in your profile. Send /start any time to come back.

Using a daily horoscope well

A short daily text works best as a small pause in the morning. Read it, notice what one line asks of you, and go on with the day. It describes a mood of the sky, and what you do with the mood is yours.

• Read it once, at the hour you chose, and leave it there. A horoscope you reread all day stops saying anything.
• Use /week at the start of a week to see the larger mood, and /month when a month begins.
• Skip a day freely. Nothing piles up: the next message comes the next day, and only one arrives per day.

If the bot makes you curious about your own chart, the next step is not a longer horoscope. It is your big three: Sun, Moon and Rising sign. And if the mood of the sky interests you more than your sign, our guides to moon phases and Mercury retrograde show the cycles the daily texts keep mentioning.