Gateway Intents

In this guide, you will learn about Discord’s Gateway Intents and how to enable them in BDFD.

What are Gateway Intents?

When a bot is connected to the Discord Gateway, it receives events on actions happening on Discord. Bots can receive a large amount of events from Discord, so in order to decrease the amount of events each bot receives, Discord requires bots to send Gateway Intents when connecting to the Gateway.
Gateway Intents allow to specify which events the bot wants to receive.

Gateway Intents can be further divided into:

• Standard Intents¹
• Privileged Intents

For example, a bot needs to send the GUILD_MESSAGES standard intent and the MESSAGE_CONTENT privileged intent to receive the MESSAGE_CREATE event with the messsage content.

📚 Learn more about Gateway Intents here.

Privileged Gateway Intents

Privileged Gateway Intents are special intents which need to be manually enabled in your bot application settings. Due to their sensitive information nature, Discord disables them by default. You should only enable them when it is required.

Currently, there are only 3 privileged gateway intents:

• GUILD_MEMBERS
• GUILD_PRESENCES
• MESSAGE_CONTENT

📌 Verified bots require approval from Discord in order to enable these intents.

Presence Intent

Allows the bot to receive PRESENCE_UPDATE event. This intent is primarily used to allow for retrieval of user presences data. For example, Activities (i.e PLAYING, LISTENING), Presence (i.e Online, Idle) and Custom status.

The following functions require this intent:

• $getCustomStatus[]
• $getUserStatus[]
• $membersCount[]

Server Members Intent

Allows the bot to receive GUILD_MEMBER_ADD, GUILD_MEMBER_UPDATE, GUILD_MEMBER_REMOVE, and THREAD_MEMBERS_UPDATE events. This intent is primarily required to fetch the entire list of guild members, and to receive specific guild member info (like guild joining, leaving, profile update etc.).

The following callbacks require this intent:

• $onJoined[]
• $onLeave[]

Message Content Intent

Unlike the two intents above, Message Content Intent doesn’t allow for any new events. Instead, it allows the bot to receive message content data, which includes content, attachments, embeds, and components.

If your bot is based on prefix-based commands, then this intent is required. Otherwise, you will need to use slash commands instead.

📌 Without this intent, your bot can only read message content data in DMs, messages where your bot was mentioned, and it’s own messages.

The following functions/callbacks require this intent:

• $awaitedCommand[]
• $messageContains[]
• $argsCheck
• $banID (First & Second Usage)
• $getEmbedData
• $getMessage (Only for content type)
• $ignoreTriggerCase
• $message
• $noMentionMessage
• $removeContains
• $trimContent
• $unban
• $unbanID

Enabling Privileged Gateway Intents

To enable Privileged Gateway Intents in your bot, follow these steps:

1. Open your bot dashboard in the BDFD app (Make sure your app version is 2.2.2 or above).

2. Click on the “Settings” tab, and then on “Go to gateway intents settings”.

3. After that, click on “Change gateway intents on Developer Portal”.

4. Select your required intents and save the changes.

   📌 The intents you have enabled in the Developer portal should be reflected in the BDFD app. If they aren’t, click on “Sync intents with Developer Portal settings”.

Example