The rights check that saves your schedule

When a channel won't connect, the cause is almost never exotic. The owner added the bot as an admin but left Post Messages unticked.

A naive check asks one question: is the owner an admin of this chat? That's necessary but nowhere near sufficient. The bot itself must also hold Post Messages — and only Telegram's getChatAdministrators answer can tell you, because it includes the bot's own entry with its permission bits.

So Antenna checks both, in one call: your membership, and the bot's rights. If the bot isn't in the admin list yet — Telegram sometimes takes a few seconds to propagate — we poll briefly before giving up and telling you exactly which of the two checks failed.

The other half is staying verified. Rights aren't forever: an owner can demote the bot months later and forget. Telegram sends a my_chat_member update the moment that happens. Antenna treats it as a first-class event: the channel flips to disconnected, scheduled posts pause instead of failing silently at 9:00, and the owner gets a DM with a re-connect link.

The lesson generalizes: verify at write-time and subscribe to change. A snapshot from connect-day is stale the first time someone edits the admin list.