3 AM. Your channel is gaining 40–50 new subscribers per minute. No ad campaign is running. No public mention happened. The subscriber count climbed 200 in the time it took you to open the bot. You need to stop the flood before understanding it.
What SOS mode actually does
The common assumption is that SOS locks the channel. It doesn't. The channel stays public, the invite link stays active. What SOS does is apply a hard rate limit: no more than 10 joins within any 60-second window. The 11th joiner — and every joiner after — gets an immediate ban. Not a kick, a ban, so those accounts can't come back.
The limit applies to all links — the public channel link and any private invite links. At the same time, SOS enables automatic banning of known abusers from TGuard's shared database, and enables auto-approval of join requests so the pending queue doesn't pile up separately from the rate limiter.
How this differs from regular security settings
In normal mode you can configure rate limits manually — say, 30 joins per 5 minutes. That's useful for background protection. During a live attack there's no time to open settings and tune parameters. SOS is a pre-configured emergency preset: 10 per 60 seconds, all protection options enabled, one tap.
One thing to know: SOS doesn't save your previous settings. After deactivation, limits reset to zero. If you had custom rate limits configured before enabling SOS, you'll need to restore them manually afterward.
When to turn it on
Turn it on when you see a live attack happening: a sudden subscriber count spike with no external cause, a TGuard antivirus alert about a mass influx of known abusers, or an obvious flood at an unusual hour. Every minute without the limit active means more bots settling into your channel — the cleanup afterward takes longer.
SOS doesn't replace baseline security configuration — it's specifically for the moment an attack is already underway.
When to turn it off
Once the join rate returns to normal and you've dealt with the source of the attack. The 10/60 limit is aggressive — if left on during a legitimate viral spike (a post getting picked up by a major outlet, for example), it will start throttling real subscribers too.
After deactivating, run a fake subscriber audit and consider a deleted accounts cleanup to clear out any bots that got through before SOS was activated.
How to activate
- Open @channel_guardian_bot.
- Select the channel under attack from your list.
- Tap "SOS" in the channel menu.
- Tap "Enable SOS Mode" — protection activates immediately.