Discord

Discord works well for community-facing use cases and casual personal use. The setup requires creating a bot application in Discord's Developer Portal — slightly more involved than Telegram, but well-documented.

Create Your Discord Bot

1. Go to discord.com/developers/applications
2. Click New Application and give it a name
3. Go to the Bot tab → click Add Bot
4. Under Privileged Gateway Intents, enable:
   • Message Content Intent (required to read messages)
5. Copy the bot token
6. Go to OAuth2 → URL Generator:
   • Scopes: bot, applications.commands
   • Bot Permissions: Send Messages, Read Message History, Use Slash Commands
7. Open the generated URL to invite the bot to your server

Save your token:

export DISCORD_BOT_TOKEN="your-bot-token-here"

Configuration

{
  "channels": {
    "discord": {
      "enabled": true,
      "dmPolicy": "pairing",
      "groupPolicy": "mention",
      "requireMention": true,
      "botToken": "${DISCORD_BOT_TOKEN}",
      "allowedGuilds": [
        "123456789012345678"
      ],
      "allowedChannels": [
        "987654321098765432"
      ]
    }
  }
}

To find IDs: enable Developer Mode in Discord settings (Appearance → Advanced → Developer Mode), then right-click any server or channel to copy its ID.

Stability Considerations

Discord's WebSocket gateway can experience crashes, zombie connections, and rate limiting during high traffic. A zombie connection is when the bot appears online but isn't receiving events — the worst kind of failure because it's silent.

Enable reconnection logic in your config:

{
  "reconnect": {
    "enabled": true,
    "maxRetries": 10,
    "retryDelay": 5000,
    "heartbeatInterval": 30000
  }
}

This automatically detects and recovers from dropped connections.

Security Recommendations

Never grant Administrator permissions. Your bot only needs to read and send messages in specific channels.

Restrict to allowedChannels. Don't let the bot operate in every channel — create a dedicated #assistant channel.

Use threads. Configure threadReplies: true to keep conversations organized and reduce rate-limiting risk.

Avoid public servers. If your bot is in a public server, use allowedGuilds to restrict it to servers you control.

Rate Limiting

Discord enforces rate limits on bots. If you're sending many messages quickly (e.g., from an automation), you may hit these limits.

To avoid rate limiting:

• Use threadReplies: true — threads have more permissive limits than main channels
• Add response delays for automated messages
• Don't use Discord for high-frequency automations — use Slack or iMessage instead

Testing

After configuration and restart:

openclaw gateway restart
openclaw logs --filter discord

@mention your bot in an allowed channel:

@YourBot are you there?

← All Channels