Table of Contents

Client Basics Questions

In the following section, you will find commonly asked questions and answers about common issues that you may face when utilizing the various clients offered by the library.

I keep having trouble with intents!

As Discord.NET has upgraded from Discord API v6 to API v9, GatewayIntents must now be specified in the socket config, as well as on the developer portal.


// Where ever you declared your websocket client.
DiscordSocketClient _client;

...

var config = new DiscordSocketConfig()
{
  .. // Other config options can be presented here.
  GatewayIntents = GatewayIntents.All
}

_client = new DiscordSocketClient(config);

Common intents:

  • AllUnprivileged: This is a group of most common intents, that do NOT require any developer portal intents to be enabled. This includes intents that receive messages such as: GatewayIntents.GuildMessages, GatewayIntents.DirectMessages
  • GuildMembers: An intent disabled by default, as you need to enable it in the developer portal.
  • GuildPresences: Also disabled by default, this intent together with GuildMembers are the only intents not included in AllUnprivileged.
  • All: All intents, it is ill advised to use this without care, as it can cause a memory leak from presence. The library will give responsive warnings if you specify unnecessary intents.
Note

All gateway intents, their Discord API counterpart and their enum value are listed HERE

Stacking intents:

It is common that you require several intents together. The example below shows how this can be done.


GatewayIntents = GatewayIntents.AllUnprivileged | GatewayIntents.GuildMembers | ..
Note

Further documentation on the | operator can be found HERE

My client keeps returning 401 upon logging in!

Warning

Userbot/selfbot (logging in with a user token) is no longer supported with this library starting from 2.0, as logging in under a user account may result in account termination.

For more information, see issue 827 & 958, as well as the official Discord API Terms of Service.

There are few possible reasons why this may occur.

  1. You are not using the appropriate TokenType. If you are using a bot account created from the Discord Developer portal, you should be using TokenType.Bot.
  2. You are not using the correct login credentials. Please keep in mind that a token is different from a client secret.

How do I do X, Y, Z when my bot connects/logs on? Why do I get a NullReferenceException upon calling any client methods after connect?

Your bot should not attempt to interact in any way with guilds/servers until the Ready event fires. When the bot connects, it first has to download guild information from Discord for you to get access to any server information; the client is not ready at this point.

Technically, the GuildAvailable event fires once the data for a particular guild has downloaded; however, it is best to wait for all guilds to be downloaded. Once all downloads are complete, the Ready event is triggered, then you can proceed to do whatever you like.

How do I get a message's previous content when that message is edited?

If you need to do anything with messages (e.g., checking Reactions, checking the content of edited/deleted messages), you must set the MessageCacheSize in your DiscordSocketConfig settings in order to use the cached message entity. Read more about it here.

  1. Message Cache must be enabled.
  2. Hook the MessageUpdated event. This event provides a before and after object.
  3. Only messages received after the bot comes online will be available in the cache.

What is a shard/sharded client, and how is it different from the DiscordSocketClient?

As your bot grows in popularity, it is recommended that you should section your bot off into separate processes. The DiscordShardedClient is essentially a class that allows you to easily create and manage multiple DiscordSocketClient instances, with each one serving a different amount of guilds.

There are very few differences from the DiscordSocketClient class, and it is very straightforward to modify your existing code to use a DiscordShardedClient when necessary.

  1. You can specify the total amount of shards, or shard ids, via DiscordShardedClient's constructors. If the total shards are not specified then the library will get the recommended shard count via the Get Gateway Bot route.
  2. The Connected, Disconnected, Ready, and LatencyUpdated events are replaced with ShardConnected, ShardDisconnected, ShardReady, and ShardLatencyUpdated.
  3. Every event handler you apply/remove to the DiscordShardedClient is applied/removed to each shard. If you wish to control a specific shard's events, you can access an individual shard through the Shards property.

If you do not wish to use the DiscordShardedClient and instead reuse the same DiscordSocketClient code and manually shard them, you can do so by specifying the ShardId for the DiscordSocketConfig and pass that to the DiscordSocketClient's constructor.

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