Platform
Intent
Also called gateway intent, privileged intent
A 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.
Intents exist so Discord does not send every bot every event. A bot that has not requested
GUILD_MEMBERS will not see joins, however correct its code is.
The three privileged intents are message content, guild members and presence. Below 100 servers a developer can enable them freely; above it, Discord must approve the use case. This is the single most common reason a self-hosted bot works in testing and fails at scale.