Provide a Message to a Slash Command

[ChrisTalman]

Proposal
In light of messages becoming a Privileged Intent next year, it might be useful for users to be able to pass one of their own messages as an option to a Slash Command.

Use Case 1
Someone might be organising a tournament. They want people to register their intent to participate in the tournament. So, they write an announcement message, and then have a bot reply to their message with two buttons: 'Attend' and 'Don't Attend'.

In the past, this might have been done with emoji reactions, but buttons have their advantages. Whether this is done with buttons or reactions, the bot needs to know the message ID.

Up to now, it could have found the most recent message by the user in the channel, or given the user a list of recent messages to choose from. But that will no longer be possible without the Privileged Intent, and a use case like this may not be enough to warrant the bot being allowed to see all messages in a server.

Use Case 2
Someone might write a message with some prices in it: I found the smartphone for $400. They could run a command, provide the message, and the bot could respond with the $400 converted to a number of relevant currencies.

Limitations
While there might be some value here, it's quite limited. The biggest limitation is that it doesn't provide a way to run a command on the message of someone else. The only way that could be legitimate would be if Discord had some way of obtaining the consent of the other user when the command is run. But I doubt that would be worth the engineering time.

[SuperchupuDev]

pretty sure context menus will be useful in this situation

[RedDaedalus]

Discord is working on context menus (basically commands you can run on a user or message) that can solve some of these problems; something similar has also been suggested here.

[ChrisTalman]

That's good to hear.

I did a search before posting this to see if anyone had made a similar proposal, but nothing came up.

Have context menus been discussed somewhere? I hadn't heard of them until now.

[Jupith]

They are in a private beta atm

[RedDaedalus]

They're still in private beta – I suspect Discord will share more soon. There was some information on them in the bot proposal blog I believe.

[ChrisTalman]

Thanks for the information. 🙂