Cron: announce delivery sends a summary instead of the full output (Telegram topics / chat channels)

Symptoms

• You have an isolated cron job that generates a multi-line report.
• After an upgrade, delivery.mode = "announce" delivers only a short summary (or noisy relay) instead of the full report output.
• Or the delivered message includes extra content you didn’t intend to send (for example, verbose intermediate text, planning notes, or model “thinking/reasoning” text).
• This is especially common when delivering to Telegram forum topics (threads).

Cause

Some OpenClaw versions/regressions have produced incorrect announce behavior for isolated cron runs:

• the delivery path summarizes output rather than forwarding the full outbound payloads, and/or
• the output is surfaced in an unexpected place (for example Control UI chat history) rather than the intended channel target.

Operationally, announce delivery is a gateway-side delivery mechanism. If you need strict control over what gets sent (exact formatting, no summary, no extra text), you’ll get the most reliable results by disabling announce and sending via the message tool yourself.

Fix

1) Most reliable: disable announce and send the full report yourself

Turn off announce delivery:

openclaw cron edit <job-id> --no-deliver

Then change the job prompt so it explicitly calls the message tool to send the report.

For Telegram forum topics, prefer sending to the group id plus a messageThreadId (topic id).

If you want to reduce the chance of verbose “thinking” style outputs in cron runs, also set a low thinking level:

openclaw cron edit <job-id> --thinking off

2) If you need a fast operational workaround: pin a known-good version

If you know a previous version delivered correctly in your environment, pin to it temporarily (many reports cite older 2026.2.x builds as working for this path), then restart the gateway.

3) If you’re on a newer build: avoid Telegram topic delivery while you verify

As a temporary measure, deliver to a DM or a non-topic group target (no thread id) to confirm the job output itself is correct, then move back to topic delivery once the regression is fixed.

Verify

• Trigger a run:
  • openclaw cron run <job-id>
• Confirm the delivered message is exactly what you expect:
  • full output (not summarized),
  • no extra “thinking/reasoning” text,
  • delivered only once.

Related

• If announce delivery fails completely with cron announce delivery failed, see:
  • /troubleshooting/solutions/cron-announce-delivery-fails-telegram/