Infos about the future of the discord bot Killua

the_future_of_killua.md

discord.py, the library Killua is currently using, is shutting down

This might not sound like a big thing... but it is. As announced here discord.py will not be maintained or updated starting immediately. Without having support for a lot of discord components yet.

What does this mean

A few weeks ago, discord announced the priviledged message intent. In a nutshell, only bots with a valid usecase for it will be allowed to read messages send by users. This means that they also won't recognise commands because they are also messages.

The alternative? Slash commands. Besides me personally not liking how these are currently implemented, dpy does not offer support for them yet and, after this announcement, never will. The message intent will be enforced starting April 2022, then every developer has to apply for the priviledged message intent and if they get denied they will not be able to read messages

So what exactly is the problem

Without being able use slash commands and other components from the same library I use for everything else things start to get difficult... especially since commands are 50%+ of my code. So it does not make too much sense to stick with the remains of dpy.

Okay, then just rewrite that with another library and you'll be fine

There are a few issues with that:

1. not like languages like JavaScript, python only had one big discord bot library being dpy. There is no reliable library I know of that has the features, usability etc what I need. of course there will be some new ones very soon but there is still the second point
2. it costs a massive amount of time to do a rewrite at that scale. I have just spend most of my summer writing code for what should be version 1.0 and that was the last time I really have a long peroid of free time. With school starting in a week and it being an important year on top of that I don't have much time to spare

Now I want to emphasise: If Killua has not fully switched to slash commands by April 2022 it will be not be usable

The ideal solution

The ideal solution is easily said; write an own dapi wrapper/library where what I need is supported. Problem: I am currently the only contributor of my bot and don't really have contacts who are able and willing to help me

The alternative

The alternatives are

1. relying on implementing a feature that will get me the message intent and then hoping discord doesn't notice I am not using slash commands

2. using a completely different library with completely different design

3. using a well maintained fork of dpy which supports what I need

Sadly all of these alternatives have their problems coming with them

I am not sure what I am going to do, but if you would be willing to help out I would appreciate that very much (a certain skill level is required)