| .. _intents: |
| .. |br| raw:: html |
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| <br /> |
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|
| ========================================== |
| About (privileged) intents and public bots |
| ========================================== |
|
|
| This page aims to explain Red's current intents requirements, |
| our stance regarding "public bots" and the impact of some announced |
| Discord changes coming in April 2022. |
|
|
| To clarify: |
|
|
| - **Small bots** are bots under 100 servers. They currently do not need to undergo Discord's |
| bot verification process |
| - **Public bots** (or big bots) are bots that have reached 100 servers. They need to be |
| `verified <https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360040720412-Bot-Verification-and-Data-Whitelisting>`_ |
| by Discord to join more than 100 servers and gain privileged intents |
|
|
| .. warning:: |
|
|
| It is **very** important that you fully read this page if you're the owner of a public bot or strive to scale your bot at that level. |
|
|
| .. _intents-intents: |
|
|
| ------- |
| Intents |
| ------- |
|
|
| Red currently requires **all intents** to be active in order to function properly. |
|
|
| The reason for this requirement is that there are some technical challenges that need |
| to be overcome before we're able to adapt Red to function with only *some* intents: |
| these challenges are mainly due to the modular / extensible nature of Red and the fact |
| that Red has a long history (dating back to 2016!), making big changes naturally slower |
| to happen. In comparison, intents have been introduced fairly recently. |br| |
| This is not a problem if you have a small bot: you can simply go to the |
| `Discord development portal <https://discord.com/developers/applications/me>`_ |
| and enable them. However, if you have a public bot Discord will want you to attain |
| verified status: you should read :ref:`our stance regarding public bots <intents-public-bots>` |
| and our guidelines for the :ref:`verification process <intents-bot-verification-process>`. |
|
|
| .. _intents-public-bots: |
|
|
| ----------- |
| Public bots |
| ----------- |
|
|
| Public bots, or big bots, are not our target audience and we **do not** offer support for them. |
|
|
| Red was designed with one single goal in mind: a bot that you can host on your own hardware |
| and customize to your needs, making it really *your* bot. **The target audience of Red are server |
| owners with a few servers**, often with specific needs that can be covered by the vast cog ecosystem |
| that the community has built over the years. |br| Red was never built with big bots in mind, |
| bots with thousands upon thousands of servers: these bots face unique challenges. |
| Such Red instances *do exist*, it is not impossible to adapt Red and meet those criteria, |
| but it requires work and bot owners with the technical knowledge to make it happen. |
| It is **not** something that we support. |br| |
| When your bot reaches the public bot scale and it is therefore required to be verified it |
| is *expected* that you know what's in your bot and how it works: that doesn't just mean on the |
| surface level, it means coding knowledge and the ability to maintain it on your own. |
|
|
| .. _intents-bot-verification-process: |
|
|
| ------------------------ |
| Bot verification process |
| ------------------------ |
|
|
| When your bot ceases to be a small bot Discord will require you to verify your bot before allowing |
| it to join more servers and gain privileged intents. If you've read the previous section, |
| you will know that we do **not** support public bots. Logically, we also do not provide help for |
| the verification process. |
|
|
| Regardless of our stance, we do feel the need to give some pointers: many bot owners reach this point |
| and become fairly lost, as they've simply been *users* so far. |
| They have installed their bot, some cogs, personalized it, yadda yadda. Again, they have been users, |
| not developers. Unless they also have an interest in development, they will likely not have a clue about |
| what's going under the hood, much like you're not expected to be a mechanic to drive your car. And there's |
| nothing wrong with that! Red has been designed to be as user friendly as possible. |br| |
| The problem is this: Red is an outlier. Discord has built the bot verification process with the expectation |
| that the owner knows *on a technical level* what their bot does and how it works. And this is because outside |
| Red, the typical bot owner is also a developer who coded their own bot from scratch. |
|
|
| While, again, we *cannot* support you going forward we want to give you some pointers to follow when filling |
| out your application: |
|
|
| - Learn on a technical level what intents are and what's going on, under the hood, in your bot. Knowing its |
| features at a surface level is not enough. What features need intents to work and why? |
| - Forget that you're hosting Red. You're hosting *a bot* and Discord wants to know what *your bot* does and why |
| you're requesting privileged intents. |br| A **very bad** answer is: *"Because Red needs them"*. |br| |
| A **good** answer is: *"My bot has X features and it needs Y intents to work properly"*. |br| We've had a fair share |
| of people that in their naivety went with the bad answer and it seems that at this point merely mentioning Red |
| is a guaranteed way to have your application rejected. |
|
|
| .. _intents-slash-commands: |
|
|
| --------------------------------- |
| Message intent and slash commands |
| --------------------------------- |
|
|
| .. warning:: |
|
|
| If you own a public bot it is extremely important that you read this section. |
|
|
| Discord has announced that **starting April 2022** the content of users' messages |
| `will be "locked" behind message intent <https://support-dev.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/4404772028055>`_ |br| |
| If you're the owner of a small bot, fear not, this is yet another box that you have to tick from the |
| `Discord development portal <https://discord.com/developers/applications/me>`_. |br| |
| But if you're the owner of a public bot, things might be a lot less pleasant. |
|
|
| To recap, unless you have |
| message intent, you will only receive message content for: |
|
|
| - Messages that your bot sends |
| - Messages that your bot receives in DM |
| - Messages in which your bot is mentioned |
|
|
| In case it's not clear by now, your bot needs message content to parse (see) the commands it receives. And if |
| you don't attain message intent, your bot will not be able to... well, do anything. |br| |
| The *bandaid fix* is for you to change your bot's prefix to a mention and a good portion of your commands will likely |
| still work. You will however lose many functions, namely anything that relies on seeing message content to act. |br| |
| The more *proper fix* is also not easy. You will need to justify your need for the message intent to Discord and |
| they will only accept "compelling use cases". |
| `It is not known what those even entail <https://gist.github.com/spiralw/091714718718379b6efcdbcaf807a024#q-what-usecases-will-be-valid>`_ at this point, but they have already stated that "parsing commands" is not a valid justification. |br| |
| To make the matter worse, Discord is making `a huge push for all bot developers to implement slash commands <https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/1500000368501-Slash-Commands-FAQ>`_, which at the moment |
| are rather lacking in features and cannot cover all the functionalities that standard commands offer. |br| |
| Discord staff |
| `stated that they will want your bot to have slash commands when you ask for message intent <https://gist.github.com/spiralw/091714718718379b6efcdbcaf807a024#q-if-we-are-granted-this-intent-will-bots-be-sanctioned-if-they-use-it-for-their-own-use-case-but-also-to-continue-to-run-normal-non-slash-commands-or-do-we-assume-that-if-you-are-granted-the-intent-you-are-trusted-with-it-and-are-allowed-to-use-it-for-additional-uses>`_. |br| |
| Slash commands might very well turn out to be a big undertaking for the Red team to implement, even more now that our |
| underlying library, `discord.py <https://github.com/Rapptz/discord.py>`_, has been discontinued. |br| |
| The time window that Discord is giving us to adapt is very narrow: **Red will likely not be able to support slash |
| commands for April 2022** and you should plan accordingly. |
