User Guide

Message destination (User, Channel and Guild)

Communication with a specific person or group of people requires a method to express the destination for a message. Security mechanisms also require a method to express people and groups in a non ambiguous way also.

Person

Human to human communication is performed by a special format: username followed a # and 4 digits. This format is not used by the discord API, which uses 18+ digit identification.

<@userid>                      -> Person
@user#discriminator            -> Person

Channel

Channel communication is expressed as a hash # followed by the channel name. The format is not used by the discord API, which uses an 18+ digit identificaiton. An aspect of channel communication that is not directy exposed thought the discord API, is when the bot operates in multiple servers a.k.a. guilds. It is possible that a channel name is not unique between multiple servers, e.g. #general can exist on server1 and server2, but the bot must be able to target the correct channel. The format that the discord backend has opted to use is the double #.

<#channelid>                   -> Room
#channel                       -> Room (a uniquely identified channel on any guild)
#channel#guild_id              -> Room (a channel on a specific guild)

Guild

Not available. Such a target will probably not be supported in the future.

Troubleshooting

privileged intents not explicitly enabled in the developer portal

discord.errors.PrivilegedIntentsRequired: Shard ID None is requesting privileged intents that have not been explicitly enabled in the developer portal.  It is recommended to go to https://discord.com/developers/applications/ and explicitly enable the privileged intents within your application's page.  If this is not possible, then consider disabling the privileged intents instead.

This is caused by a mismatch between the intents requested by errbot-backend-discord and the Discord application intent settings. Give the application the permissions it needs or disable them in the configuration.

failed to lookup user

ValueError: Failed to get the user <18_digit_id>

This error can be caused when the bot has not been allowed access to the member privileged intent.

Bot ignores all messages

When running with debug logs enable, it’s possible to see the message event received from Discord. The event field content is empty.

17:27:06 DEBUG    discord.gateway           For Shard ID None: WebSocket Event: { "t": "MESSAGE_CREATE", <snip>... "content": "", <snip>... }}

This indicates the bot has not been allowed access to the message_content privileged intent.

Acknowledgements

This backend uses the python-discord module. We are most grateful to the dedicated and talented team that provide such a top class project.