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Get a Discord or Telegram Alert When a Rust Player Comes Online

Updated

Set up automatic join and leave alerts for any Rust player in Discord or Telegram, step by step. Free, no bot to host.

Refreshing a tracker page to see whether your neighbour has logged off gets old fast. You can get a message in Discord or Telegram instead, the moment a player joins or leaves, without hosting a bot yourself.

What you get

  • Joined: the player came online, and on which server.
  • Left: the player went offline.
  • Switched server: they are still playing, but somewhere else.
  • Changed name: with both the old and the new name, so you don't lose them.

Alerts go to a Discord channel (through a webhook), to your Telegram, or to both.

Step 1. Sign in to RustFinder

Open RustFinder and sign in with Steam or Google. There is no separate registration and no password.

Step 2. Choose where the alerts go

Option A: Discord

  1. In Discord, open the channel you want the alerts in (your own server or a clan server where you have the rights), then Edit Channel → Integrations → Webhooks.
  2. Click New Webhook, name it (for example "RustFinder"), then Copy Webhook URL.
  3. In RustFinder, open Settings, paste the URL, press Save webhook and then Send test. A test message should appear in the channel.

A webhook can post into its channel and nothing else; it can't read your messages. Anyone with the URL can post there too, so don't share it.

Option B: Telegram

  1. In RustFinder Settings, press Link Telegram.
  2. Telegram opens the RustFinder bot. Press Start. The bot confirms that the account is linked. The link is valid for 5 minutes; if it expires, press the button again.
  3. Back in Settings, Send test checks that messages arrive.

Step 3. Start tracking the player

  1. Search for the player by name, Steam ID or Steam profile link (how to find a Steam ID).
  2. Open their profile and press Track Player.

You can track up to 3 players at a time and swap them whenever you like on the Tracked page. Each tracked player can also get your own label (say, "neighbour north"), which is used in the alerts.

How fast are the alerts?

  • Joined usually arrives within a few minutes. A player who has been offline for a long time is checked less often, so their first alert can take up to about ten minutes.
  • Left arrives up to 10 minutes late, on purpose. Server trackers sometimes split one play session into two when a player briefly drops (a server hiccup, a reconnect, a queue). Without the wait you would get "left" followed by "joined" a minute later; with it, a short drop sends nothing at all.

Troubleshooting

  • No test message in Discord: check that you copied the whole URL (it starts with https://discord.com/api/webhooks/) and that the webhook wasn't deleted in the channel settings.
  • The Telegram bot says nothing: the link expired. Press Link Telegram again and open the new link within 5 minutes.
  • A player plays but no alert comes: make sure the profile you track is the right one; names aren't unique. If several players share the name, the server and session history on the profile tells them apart.

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