Platform

Gateway

The persistent WebSocket connection over which Discord pushes real-time events to a bot. Bots receive messages, joins and edits through the gateway rather than by polling.

A bot that is “offline” has lost its gateway connection. Actions the bot takes are sent over the REST API, but everything it reacts to arrives over the gateway — which is why a bot can appear online and still miss events if its connection is degraded.

See also

IntentA subscription flag that tells Discord which categories of event a bot wants to receive. Three intents are privileged and require approval once a bot passes 100 servers.
ShardingSplitting a bot across multiple gateway connections, each handling a subset of guilds. Discord requires sharding once a bot passes roughly 2,500 guilds on a single connection.
Rate LimitDiscord’s cap on how many REST requests a bot may make. Limits apply per route and major parameter — not per endpoint and not per application — so two channels have separate budgets.

All 43 terms