Allow bots to send ephemeral messages outside of Slash Command Interactions

[vladfrangu]

Description

In a bit of a relation to #2483, it would be awesome if bots can send ephemeral messages without depending on interactions (think bots that need to migrate, or bots that want to show just the author a result without sending them a DM message). This can be achieved hypothetically by including a context of sorts to which user the message is for (example "original_author_id": "139836912335716352" which would send the ephemeral message to that user)

Why This is Needed

While it isn't strictly needed, it would be a nice-to-have feature, as it provides simple dismissible messages to the end user

Alternatives Considered

Either depending on slash commands, or... send the user in question a DM

Additional Details

N/A

[garantiertnicht]

In addition to the mentioned use cases, this would be wonderful to have in bots offering automagic moderation (such as swearword filtering, deleting invite links, sanitizing nicknames, …).

From a usability perspective, it would be nice to be able to inform users that and why their content was deleted or changed. However, sending this in chat clutters it more then it's worth; sending DMs for such things has the danger of being missed if the user disabled notifications or has disabled DMs. (Also, getting a DM every time your message got deleted gets annoying fast.) And obviously, using slash commands isn't an option for these features.

One issue I have with this is abusability tho. As soon as this gets added, there will be a bot which offers private messaging using ephemeral messages. And I don't really have any idea on how those would be moderated both in the Guild and with Trust & Safety.

[muddyfish]

If this were to be implemented, it would be nice if there was a "stop receiving notifications from this bot" or "stop receiving permissions related notifications from this bot".

Perhaps we could get an interaction token whenever we delete a message ourselves. Or perhaps being able to send permissions requests to any user who is able to grant the permissions we're looking for without any "interaction"

[Jgouken]

With a "stop receiving notifications from this bot" button, it creates the same problem as DMs do, such as having the bot simply blocked, or causes accidental pressing of the button. If you have to turn on the interaction, then most people will not have them activated to use them for moderation.

[Jgouken]

Found this answer on StackOverflow.

The Ephemeral Messages FAQ and Developer Documentation on Interaction Responses show that only interaction responses currently support ephemeral messages.

There will not be any support for uninvoked ephemeral messages, according to Mason, a Discord engineer (message link, screenshot), as it would open quite a lot of abuse possibilities.

As AEnterprise said in the Discord Developers server: "Imagine bots being able to spam advertisements only visible to specific members, that are not stored [on Discord's servers] so very little to no proof for Trust & Safety to even look up".

[IanMitchell]

Pretty much this - ephemeral messages would be a huge abuse vector if we opened it up to non-interaction events. They would require a massive reworking in order for us to properly monitor them

[ckohen]

To be fair, I upvoted this suggestion for two use cases. One is auto moderation that has some sort of response. Typically these responses are automatically deleted by the bot after a short period of time, meaning the user may not have a chance to fully understand what it is saying, imagine if the clyde messages disappeared after 5 seconds or something. The other has actually been replaced already by buttons!

I think that second one brings up a good point though. As we get more interaction types, there's more things users can do that allow responding ephemerally.

I definitely agree with the uninvoked standpoint since it actually doesn't make that much sense if you think about it. There's no guarantee that the user in question is online or even in that channel, so its possible they won't ever see the message.