Custom bot prefix for bots, as an better alternative to slash commands for now?

[renhiyama]

While slash commands are still coming out, it's a huge step from a prefix based command handler, and I can say that it's pretty much hard to make a slash command handler with the popular libs, it's not their problem, but slash commands are made to be a lot different from message.content based implementation. While you all can definitely say slash are good, but it's still in its early stages and I think it's not much good than the nostalgia message prefix.

Since the whole point of slash commands being to just not allow bots to read messages, couldn't we have another, simpler alternative to slash commands? Custom prefix registering (both globally and per server)?
Discord team could make the limit of prefix being 3 characters only, and having a special character in it, and then allow bot devs to use it as a way of still using the old system? I think it's a lot easier than implementing the whole freaking slash commands stuff, both for discord team, and for bot devs.
Maybe the client could warn users when they start with those prefixes that that message will be shared with the bot who uses that prefix, and having a one time notification that gets removed once the user clicks "agree" or "x"?
Why?
Slash commands maybe be cool, and will be maybe in future, and may remove the current problems, but it definitely doesn't provides competitive "gaming" on discord.
What do I mean? Taking dank memer bot for example, writing pls dep all will be a lot faster than using the slash command implementation. For some bots, every second matters, sometimes people are going to rob you, and so the faster you write the command and let the bot read it, the more faster you're going to save yourself. There are other countless bots that can achieve similar jobs too!

Why did I thought of this idea? Because taking the look at discord blog, they said the bot can still read messages from dms and pings, so if pings can be done, why not implement prefix based back again?

[Stalruth]

This has been suggested many times before including in previous developer stages - the staff have ruled it out every time.

They've cited (as you note) that bots can access their pings and DMs as well as the extra complexity of managing prefixes as their reasoning.

[renhiyama]

I guess I was late here to argue before slash came out, but I want to still argue about it. Bot prefixes were made so people and bots could differentiate bot commands from normal chats
And why can't we use that point as a way of not using slashes but still keeping away from "message intents" actually

[i0bs]

The Discord staff have been very transparent about the reason behind the message intent behind for privacy and security reasons. I agree with the developers' response that applying for the intent "to make message commands still work" is and should remain invalid. I strongly believe that we'll be seeing most developers like myself transition over to interactions including application commands for the long-term future. While message commands may have their own benefits, an intuitive UX design far supersedes the need for the former in my eyes.

[IanMitchell]

Duplicate of #3744 - custom prefixes aren't something we're exploring, for many of the reasons mentioned in that thread