Message Content is Now a Privileged Intent

[shaydewael]

⚠️  Today, message content is becoming a privileged intent for verified bots and apps as previously detailed

Any app that does not have the message content intent configured in its settings within the Developer Portal wiIl receive empty values in fields that expose message content across Discord's APIs (including the content, embeds, attachments, and components fields). These restrictions do not apply for messages that a bot or app sends, in DMs that it receives, or in messages in which it is mentioned.

The new message content restrictions will happen gradually throughout today, so it may take a bit before your app encounters the new behaviors.

More information about the message content intent is in the documentation.

Impact of Message Content Restrictions

If your app is unverified

Discord approval is not required to use the message content intent, but you still must enable the intent in your app’s settings within the Developer Portal.

Existing unverified apps will automatically have the message content intent toggled on in their settings, but going forward, newly-created unverified apps will have the message content intent toggled off by default.

If your app is verified

Verified apps apps must be approved for the message content intent to receive message content. If your verified app isn’t approved, or doesn’t account for the new message content restrictions, it will break for users.

Applying for the Message Content Intent

To be approved for the intent, your app must have a use case that requires message content as described in the Help Center. You can apply for privileged intent from your app’s settings in the Developer Portal after it’s verified.

Once your app is approved for the message content intent, you still must toggle the intent in your app’s settings on the Bot page under the “Privileged Gateway Intents” section.

Temporary Message Content Intent Toggle

Verified apps can temporarily opt-in to a grace period which will allow your app to continue receiving message content until October 1, 2022. However, if you opt-in to the grace period, your app will be prevented from joining any additional servers until you opt-out. You can toggle the temporary grace period at any time in your app's settings within the developer portal. Details about temporarily enabling message content is in the Help Center.

Gateway Session Reconnects

As part of the deployment of the new message content restrictions, the majority of connected bots (verified and unverified) will see their WebSocket gateway sessions invalidated and closed. Because of the amount of bots using the Gateway, these restarts will not happen all at once.

For the Gateway session rollovers, bots will receive an INVALID_SESSION (Opcode 9) and the d field will be set to false, indicating the session is not resumable and that your bot will need to reconnect to the Gateway and send a new Identify event. More information about INVALID_SESSION and how to handle it is in the Gateway documentation.

If your bot is correctly implementing normal recovery logic of a dropped connection, you shouldn't see any issues. Most developer libraries have recovery logic built-in, but if you aren't sure you can check the library's documentation or ask its maintainers.

Questions? Issues?

If you have any additional questions about the message content restrictions, you can ask questions in our Discord Developers server or reach our Developer Support team.