Discord2 of 10
Setting her up on Discord
On this page
Three things happen on Discord's side: you create the application, you turn on the two intents she asks for, and you invite her with the permissions you want her to have. Installing and configuring her is the next page.
1. Create the application and the bot
In the Discord Developer Portal, create a new application and open its Bot tab. Take the bot token from there and keep it to hand: you give it to her on the next page, and you never need to paste it into a file.
She registers no slash commands, so the bot scope is the only one she uses when you invite her.
2. Turn on the two privileged intents
Portal → Bot → Privileged Gateway Intents: turn on Message Content and Server Members.
She asks the gateway for exactly six intents:
| Intent | Privileged | What breaks without it |
|---|---|---|
guilds | no | She knows about no servers at all |
guild_messages | no | She never sees a message in a server |
dm_messages | no | She never sees a DM |
voice_states | no | She cannot see who is in a voice channel, or which one you are in |
message_content | yes | Every message arrives with empty content: a room of blank lines |
members | yes | No member list — she cannot resolve a name, read someone's permissions, or act on a person |
presences is deliberately off. Nothing in the code reads it and it is the heaviest cache Discord
offers.
Because she asks for both privileged intents at connect time, Discord refuses the whole connection if
either is off. kotoba discord catches that, prints the two names and the portal path, and exits
rather than starting half-working.
3. Invite her
Invite her with the bot scope and the permissions you actually want her to have. The first block is
all she needs to talk; everything below it is server management, so grant only what you want possible.
| What she does | Discord permission it needs |
|---|---|
| Read a channel and answer in it, reply to the message that called her | View Channels, Send Messages, Read Message History |
| Post a message in another channel, or open a post in a forum | Send Messages there, and Create Posts in a forum |
| Show an approval card (an embed with two buttons) | Embed Links |
| Attach a file from her workspace | Attach Files |
| Create, rename, move and delete channels, categories and forums; set topics, slowmode and forum tags | Manage Channels |
| Create, rename, recolour and delete roles; give and take roles; make a channel private or public | Manage Roles |
| Rename a member | Manage Nicknames |
| Time somebody out | Moderate Members |
| Kick, ban | Kick Members, Ban Members |
| Move somebody between voice channels | Move Members |
| Join a voice channel and speak in it | Connect, Speak |
Three limits are hers, not Discord's, and they hold whatever you grant:
- She never hands out Administrator. A batch that asks for it is refused with a sentence, and the
permission is stripped even from a direct
set_permissionscall. - She cannot touch a role at or above her own, nor act on a person whose top role is at or above hers, nor on the server owner. She checks this before showing you a card, so an impossible plan is refused in words instead of failing halfway through.
- A permission she does not hold comes back as a sentence, not a crash: the batch stops at the first refusal and she tells you where it stopped.
4. Choose whether she needs voice
Voice needs more than the invite: the voice extra, an ElevenLabs key and, on Linux and macOS, the
system libopus library. Voice in a room covers it. Text works without any
of that.