Easier searching for slash commands

[RivenSkaye]

There was a proposal for customizing prefixes for the Interactions API (topic #3744) which had a flaw pointed out regarding the UX suffering from it.
I do feel like there's room for improvement in the slash command interface though, especially when several bots register slash commands in a server and those in the latter half of the alphabet get pushed all the way down. Something that the old format of using prefixes didn't suffer from. For example take a bot currently sporting the prefix ;, if you need to know what commands the bot offers just send ;help and there's a readable list in the chat. Sure, slash commands can include a /help detailing the options, but then you'd need to scroll down to search and select the one for the right bot.

The proposal I have takes the custom prefixes or grouping idea from the old bot format as an optional field for registering the commands, changeable by any member of a guild that has the relevant permissions (Manage Server for managing bots if I'm not mistaken). Rather than replacing the new global prefix /, I propose being able to combine this grouping to ease the search for the desired bot. One could type /; and get the list of commands for bots, filtered to those that group under the semicolon.

Naturally this also needs some form of restriction, since it would come with a lot of difficulties to implement if the grouping can be any arbitrary string (we wouldn't want a 1k char long prefix for example). For this I'd say allowing groupings of one or two characters in length that may not end in an alphanumeric character. This would allow a simple regex to be applied for finding the grouping, something like /\/(.?|[^a-zA-Z0-9]){1,2}/ which would aid in getting the commands for a specific bot tremendously while allowing keyboard-only input that doesn't require holding down or mashing an arrow key.

edit: fixed the regex to allow max 2 chars, previous version went up to 3

[gnubufferoverflows]

To be honest I think this suffers from the same problem as #3744, as the purpose of application commands is that it should be intuitive to the user, and especially on mobile, people won't want to type in /; or other special characters. I believe there is a psuedo-workaround, as you could prefix bots with /yourbotname_command , but doesn't really work from a UX perspective either. I just hope Discord improves their command menu, and I could see why people would want workarounds for it.

[RivenSkaye]

Hence why it should also still show up in the full list when only typing /. It would just add a filter in the form of old prefixes that isn't necessarily required to use the command. Again, it's not meant to replace or alter the slash as a global prefix idea and it would be an optional arg for the bot when registering its commands

[gnubufferoverflows]

@RivenSkaye That's fair, but again, on mobile that would be pretty tedious to have to type in special characters for each command you want to use