A catalogue is only useful if you understand what its order means. Most of them say «trending» or «top» and leave you to guess. This one tells you, and the rules are short.
The public catalogue lives at app.talaforge.net and, inside Telegram, in the Mini App. You can browse it in a browser with no account and no cookies; the chat itself always opens in @talaforge_bot. Every character in it was written by a user of Talaforge, and only characters their author chose to publish, and that passed review, are listed.
What a card shows
Each card is a character's shop window: the name, the public blurb their author wrote, a picture or a monogram, a few tags, the language it was written in, a heart count, and, once there are enough votes, a star rating. The line «by» and a name appears when the author has a public creator profile and opens their creator page.
The blurb is the public description. The private persona that steers the character is never part of the catalogue and never sent to it — that field belongs to the author.
Tap the card and you see the full description, similar characters and a button that opens the character in Telegram. Where a character has grown into its own bot, the button reads «Continue in» and the bot's @username.
The four sorts, in plain words
- **Hot** is what is rising now. It weighs hearts, shares and recent chats, a little of the rating, and a bonus for being new that fades over about a week. A character you have never heard of can be Hot on a good week. It is the default.
- **New** is newest first, nothing else.
- **Popular** is what people have loved over the whole time the character has existed — hearts, shares and chats together, with no fresh-ness bonus. Old favourites live here.
- **Top rated** is the best-rated characters, with a safeguard: a character needs at least five ratings to count as established, and the score leans toward the average until it has more, so one five-star vote cannot outrank a well-reviewed character.
In every sort, characters that have a picture are shown before those that do not, and inside each group the order is the sort's own. Your choice of sort is remembered the next time you open the app.
Language
The language filter starts on All languages. In that default view your own language comes first, then English and characters with no set language, then the rest — nothing is hidden, only ordered. When a character exists in several languages as separate cards, you see the one that suits you rather than five copies of the same person.
Pick a language and you see characters written in it plus characters that declare no language. If there are none in your language yet, the app says so and shows everything rather than an empty screen. The chips do not show counts: they are there to choose, not to rank.
Tags
Tags describe what a character is — a role, a setting, a mood — and they come from an automatic tagger, not from a list the author fills in. The app shows the twelve most common, and a longer sheet holds up to forty. A tag is offered only when at least three characters carry it, and words that only brag («best», «masterpiece») are never offered.
Tags widen rather than narrow: pick two and you see characters with either one, up to six at a time. Tap a tag on any card and you dive into it, with a Back row to return. The labels are translated into your language; the tags themselves are the same for everyone.
Search
Search looks in the name and the description — not in tags and not in the creator's name — and finds the typed letters anywhere inside them. It knows Cyrillic and Latin spellings of the same name, so a search in Russian for a character known by an English name still finds it.
With the default Hot sort a search switches to relevance: names that start with what you typed first, then names that contain it, then descriptions. The box remembers your last six searches as chips. Filters you have set still apply, so if a search finds nothing, check that a tag or language chip is not narrowing it.
Hearts, stars and what they count
A heart is a favourite: it adds the character to your list and counts toward its Popular score. Hearts and stars are given from Telegram — in a browser the buttons ask you to open the bot.
Ratings are one to five whole stars, one vote per person, and the author cannot rate their own character. The average appears on the card only after five votes; before that the card says «New» and the average is held back, because a two-vote four-star is not evidence of anything.
Similar characters
On a character's page, a row of similar characters is chosen by shared tags, with rarer tags counting for more, plus a small push for characters that are well loved. No more than two come from the same author, and a few places are kept for newer characters that share the tags, so the row is not only the same famous names.
The in-bot browser is the short version
In the bot, New Chat leads to Public Characters, ten to a page, with four sorts — Newest, Trending, Top and A–Z — and a switch between your language and all languages. It has no tag filter, no ratings and no text search; for those the bot offers a button that opens the app.
The Creator Catalog, in the bot's main menu, lists creators rather than characters: by popularity, by newest profile or alphabetically.
The plain directory, for crawlers and for people without JavaScript
app.talaforge.net/characters/ is a static directory of every public character, forty-eight to a page, with a language filter in the address — for example ?lang=ru. It lists them in the order they were added, not by popularity, and every entry is a page that names the character, its language, tags and rating once it has one.
What you will not find
Private characters and characters published «link only» are not in the catalogue; they open only for people who have the link. You will not find exact totals per language, other people's private prompts or anything that is a conversation: every chat, mature or not, happens in Telegram, and mature roleplay sits behind an age confirmation in the bot.
The ten-minute test
- Open app.talaforge.net and leave the sort on Hot. Note the first five.
- Switch to Top rated. Notice who moves, and which cards show «New» instead of a score.
- Pick two tags that interest you and watch the list widen, not shrink.
- Search for one thing you like, then for the same thing in another script.
- Open a character you like, read the similar row, and press the button to start chatting.
If you write characters yourself, creating one takes a sentence, and the creator cabinet shows how people reach it. It opens in Telegram at @talaforge_bot; nothing to install.