Search Bar Functionality #3216
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One of the coolest things on discord is how amazing it's search bar works. Unfortunately, there is no way to interact with it using a bot that I am aware of. Instead i would have to fetch hundreds of thousands if not millions of messages depending on the servers activity and size in order to get the same functionality. Is it possible to add this functionality so a request could be made something like: GET /search/?in:#channel&filterText="keyword"Which could send back any and all necessary messages instead of having to fetch so many messages in a loop. |
Replies: 46 comments 27 replies
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This is purposefully not in the API. Like you said, search is very straining and thus discord limits it to human use only to limit the load. |
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@Pikachu920 No idea what's Discord team stance on using undocumented stuff, never had need for anything not mentioned in docs. |
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It’s a pretty easy guideline: if it’s undocumented, don’t use it. |
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They can't, it's for user accounts. |
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We've thought about adding support for this in the past, not sure if its still planned but I'll bump the request internally. |
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That would be great, it really sucks to have to load a million messages with a bot just to find a couple hundred from one user! |
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The plan has always been to allow bots to use the search API, with a pretty high rate limit, and no message context, however this has always been considered a really low priority task, relative to other things the team and myself are working on. However, if you’re interested, replying to this issue with your specific use case and thumbs upping this comment will help me make a case for prioritizing this internally. |
No, bots should have a lower rate limit for this API. After all, they could perform the same query in their own databases. |
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Why are you asking him? He’s just a contractor. |
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Please keep this discussion for productive comments like use cases, rather than bumps. It isn't necessary to ask individual devs about this. You can show support by upvoting the discussion if you haven't already. |
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I've been waiting patiently for this mostly for statistical purposes. In my case, the |
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My bot is used for Official Game servers for various different games. The game developers asked me to build a feature that could help them find key topics that are being discussed by all the players on those servers. In this specific case, I was asked to analyze how many players have sent a message discussing Another case was about checking community feedback on certain topics. Example a new hero is released or some change is made and they wan't to get all the messages sent about that hero in X time frame that can be processed into These official servers are really big for example, two off the top of my head are 92,000+ and 34,000+ members and really active servers. These were requested based on how a similar thing was possible on a separate platform and it was asked of me if it was possible on discord as well. Theoretically, I can build this with loops and fetching every message in that time but that is kind of crazy due to the server's size. I made this issue in the hopes of finding a better way. My use case is just one example of what is possible with this. Search opens up enormous possibilities for bot devs. Just a few examples:
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Apart from the analytics side of things: I don't intend to develop this feature myself, as all of my bots are application-specific, but I could also see this feature being useful for pruning messages via general-purpose moderation bots, which could be given a search string in the same format as the search bar uses and delete all the messages that match it. (An obvious limitation to the usefulness of something like this would be that messages older than two weeks can't be deleted via the bulk delete method (iirc), but bots could easily check themselves for messages in the results to fall within this time frame, and such a feature would still be useful regardless.) |
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@Geo1088 indeed, the search endpoint supports (though, i feel |
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Part of my bot's logging features allow people to make decisions about if they should ban people based on their past behaviour on the server, it would be nice to be able to pull how much a user has chatted / some samples of messages in a user info command. For example someone who barely speaks and is suddenly attacking a bunch of people in chat is probably a problem, but if someone that's a contributing community member every day starts something one day, it may just be them having a bad day. This would be along with the message deleting, say purging a specific users messages from a channel going back a couple days, without necessarily banning them then unbanning them or something like that, but I think Geo has already made a good case for that. |
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Bumping this. |
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Bump. Would be very useful for moderating older comments that our current bots didn't filter. Thanks! |
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My use case would be to get the total number of times a specific user was mentioned within a specific channel. Im making a bot for a FiveM community and need to be able to easily display how many times a user has been commended or DAd |
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This is something that would help me out significantly. Instead of having to scan through every message in a channel, you would just be able to search for specific messages containing specific keywords. |
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I want to create a bot that allows a user to look for messages with cetain keywords within his/her channels |
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Bump. Same reasons as everyone else, still waiting for an official API method for bot instead of me having to use user account just to use this endpoint. |
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Automating a user account is against Discord's TOS btw |
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I'm aware of that already, but nothing can be done when its not possible in the bot API :) It is crucial for my bot to have this function, as I need to count, using |
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Bump, need this to get a user's last message |
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Just get the last messages then and search yourself 🤔 |
this doesn't really work in large servers where people may go months without sending a message tbh. even in smaller servers you would need to fetch the last who knows how many messages per channel in order to find which was actually the most recent from a user, and if you can't find anything then it can turn into fetching every message in every channel... this isn't really possible with bots and current rate limits personally for this use case i would recommend saving the metadata of users' most recent messages in a database to refer back to, but this isn't always possible either and can quickly turn into handling thousands of database writes per second for large bots having a search method on the API would still make this use case far easier and more reliable than current solutions |
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The thing is, I can't keep track of this bot-side as I need it to know a user's last message immediately after the feature is implemented. I may have to resort to the same method as Vip3rLi0n in this comment otherwise. |
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This could be first implemented without the query part, only allowing more specific filters, like: I believe this wouldn't be so much of a performance problem like full text search could be and would allow bot developers to get specific counts and filtering! |
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@advaith1 seems like you also struggled with this. while you still are at discord, could you PLEASE do something to get this implemented? thanks |
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Bump |
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Bump, This is something that would help me out significantly. |
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Bump! |
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Bump! It would be a HIGHLY USEFUL feature! |
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as much as i would love to have this one specific and relatively easy-to-implement feature right now just like everyone else here, it's been 7 years of silence from discord i think it's clear that they don't care anymore :( |
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Andrewthus go back to wse |
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wtf is a wse? |
probably misspelled "swe", Software Engineering |
snowy just bc u saw my name in the discord server's github channel doesnt mean u gotta intervene like that in a serious discussion thread 💀 |
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Bump! |
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maybe someday |
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We've given bots access to message search, as a preview! The endpoint has been added to our preview spec, try it out! |
You can't use any Discord data to train AI's, It's against the ToS, Shapes Inc got slapped for that and other issues, so if you want to get banned then gl. |
Very confused on why this was edited to completely change the first paragraph, but as others have said, this is explicitly against terms of service and would likely be a massive violation of user privacy. Discussing projects in a Discord server is not consent to have your messages fed to LLMs, and the assumed consent that this implies is pretty gross. |
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I've edited my post because it seemed like people misunderstood my point. To clarify, I have no intention of training LLMs on user data or anything... To provide some context: there are tools like Context7 that connect documentation to LLM agents so that the code or answers they produce are more accurate. Even a simple tool like web search reduces hallucinations. The problem I often encounter is that for certain technologies, there aren't enough documentation/articles on the web. Much of this knowledge is trapped in Discord guilds and other platforms. This information is intended to be public and searchable, but it isn't due to technical limitations, such as the lack of a search API. I think it would be useful if a discord guild admin could add a bot that will make certain channels searchable via context7-like protocol. I understand the general resentment toward AI companies for misappropriating intellectual property, but this specific data is meant to be public. The LLM isn't "stealing" it; it's simply finding it, much like Google does. |
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I perfectly understood your point the first time, it was just a bad take |
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So, I am genuinely confused. Can I have my AI agent (like Claude or Codex) use a Discord bot to search for messages in a channel using this API? Does it violate ToS? I am not going to train the LLM on the data, since I am on Enterprise plan, I have even turned off the training feature in my AI agent. So, if I only use the agent to search discord to maybe fix issues is that fine? |
and others
We've given bots access to message search, as a preview! The endpoint has been added to our preview spec, try it out!