Glossary

Overview

This page defines terms used throughout the discord.go documentation.

Terms

Application A Discord application registered in the Developer Portal. Has a client ID, client secret, and one or more bot tokens.

Audit Log Reason A header (X-Audit-Log-Reason) attached to REST requests that modifies guild state. Appears in the guild's audit log. Limited to 512 characters.

Bucket A rate limit group identified by Discord's X-RateLimit-Bucket header. Requests in the same bucket share a rate limit.

Cache An in-memory or external store for Discord entities (guilds, channels, users, etc.). Used to avoid redundant REST calls. Eventually consistent.

Collector A mechanism that waits for a specific gateway event (e.g., a button click) with a filter and timeout. See bot.AwaitInteraction and bot.AwaitMessage.

Command Sync The process of registering slash commands with Discord. Global sync takes up to one hour; guild sync is near-instant.

Components V2 Discord's updated component system with containers, sections, separators, and media galleries. Activated by setting FlagIsComponentsV2 on message flags.

DAVE Discord Audio Visual End-to-end encryption. An MLS-based protocol for end-to-end encrypted voice. Supported by discord.go.

Dispatcher The component that receives raw gateway payloads and fans them out to registered handlers.

Gateway Discord's WebSocket connection for real-time events. Uses API v10.

Heartbeat A periodic ping sent over the gateway to keep the connection alive. The round-trip time is available via Heartbeater.Ping.

Identify The payload sent after connecting to the gateway to authenticate. Includes the token, intents, and shard information. Rate-limited to 1 per 5 seconds.

Intent A bit flag that declares which event categories the bot wants to receive. Privileged intents (MessageContent, GuildMembers, GuildPresences) require approval in the Developer Portal.

Interaction A user-initiated event from a slash command, button, select menu, or modal. Must be acknowledged within 3 seconds.

Middleware A function that wraps a command handler to add cross-cutting concerns like permission checks, validation, and cooldowns.

Nonce A unique value used in voice encryption to prevent replay. A 4-byte counter zero-padded to 12 bytes for AES-256-GCM.

Opus The audio codec used by Discord for voice. Frames are typically 20ms.

Presence A user's online status and activity. Requires the GuildPresences privileged intent to receive for other users.

Rate Limit Discord's per-bucket and global request limits. The library handles these automatically. Global limit is 50 requests/second.

Resume Reconnecting to the gateway and replaying missed events using a session ID and sequence number.

Session The gateway session state, including session ID, resume URL, and sequence number. Used to resume after disconnections.

Shard A single gateway connection responsible for a subset of guilds. Guilds are assigned to shards by (guildID >> 22) % numShards.

Shard Manager The component that manages multiple shard connections, including startup ordering, concurrency buckets, and shutdown.

Snowflake Discord's ID format. A 64-bit integer encoding timestamp, worker ID, process ID, and increment. Represented as snowflake.ID in discord.go.

Token A bot's authentication credential. Prefixed with Bot in REST Authorization headers. Never commit to version control. Stored in unexported fields on rest.Client and gateway.Client, accessible only via SetToken, SetBearerToken, or SetBotToken. bot.Start validates the token format (three dot-separated segments) and returns ErrInvalidToken if malformed.

Webhook A mechanism for sending messages to a channel without a bot user. Has an ID and token. Discord does not sign incoming webhook payloads.

Interaction Server An http.Handler (interactions.Server) that receives Discord interaction webhooks, verifies their Ed25519 signature and timestamp freshness, and dispatches them to a user-provided handler. Auto-responds to pings and defaults to a deferred response when the handler returns nil.

Paginator A helper (bot.Paginator) that creates a paginated message with prev/next/stop button navigation. Pages are provided as PaginatorPage structs. Supports per-user restriction and timeout.

Reaction Collector A one-shot wait (bot.AwaitReaction) for a matching MESSAGE_REACTION_ADD event. Uses a filter function and context for cancellation/timeout.

Nonce Counter A 4-byte counter used in voice AES-256-GCM encryption. Incremented per packet and zero-padded to 12 bytes for GCM. The library checks for overflow before each send to prevent nonce reuse.