Booth troubleshooting: approvals that ask for the desktop, and other quirks

The Booth lets you approve or reject Otto's parked decisions from your phone over Telegram. It has a few behaviors that look like bugs but are deliberate. This article explains the "open the desktop" message, how pairing works when it misbehaves, and what the Booth can and cannot do.

"Open Booked Solid on your desktop to apply this"

When you tap Approve on a Booth card, your phone does not do the work. The tap tells the desktop app to run the actual approval on your computer, through the same engine path as approving inside the app. That means the Booked Solid window must be open on your desktop.

If the app is closed when you tap, the bot replies Open Booked Solid on your desktop to apply this. Nothing is lost: the Approve and Reject buttons stay live on the card. Open Booked Solid on your computer, then tap the button again.

A few related quirks worth knowing:

• Each decision is sent once. The Booth pushes a card one time. If you dismiss the message in Telegram, check the decision inside the app instead.
• "Already handled" means the decision was resolved somewhere else, for example inside the app, before your tap landed.
• A Telegram outage never blocks you. The Booth is an extra channel. Every decision still waits in the app, so you can always handle it there.

Pairing quirks and re-pairing

Setup is three steps in Settings: paste your BotFather bot token, send your bot /start in Telegram and tap Link my phone, then turn the Booth on. Two things trip people up:

1. The token is verified live before it saves. If the token is wrong or truncated, it will not be accepted. Paste the full token exactly as BotFather sent it.
2. Link my phone needs a recent /start. The link step captures your chat from the bot's recent messages. Send /start to your bot first, then tap Link my phone right after.

Only taps from your linked chat count. If you tap buttons from a different Telegram account or chat, they are silently ignored - that is a security feature, not a glitch. If you switched phones or Telegram accounts, re-pair: open your bot in Telegram on the new device, send /start, and tap Link my phone in Settings again.

Note the Booth is an Otto-tier feature. On Pearl, the Booth shows an upgrade note instead of running.

What the Booth can approve vs what it can only show

Booth cards carry exactly two actions: Approve and Reject. Approve runs the parked decision through the engine on your desktop. Reject strikes the item through under a Cleared trail - nothing is ever hard-deleted, so you can review rejected items later in the app.

Anything beyond yes or no - editing a draft, changing a price, asking a follow-up question - happens in the app, not on the phone. Also, the card text you see in Telegram is deliberately scrubbed: client emails, phone numbers, and ids are stripped before the message rides to Telegram. If a card looks light on detail, that is the privacy scrubbing, and the full context is waiting in the app.

Still stuck? Email bookedsolid@kivimedia.freshdesk.com and a person will help.