Discord Bot Poller

Use this skill when an automation job needs to watch one Discord channel and react to new messages without a full gateway bot framework. The helper uses the Discord REST API, stores the last seen message id in memory or a caller-provided value, and honors rate-limit responses.

When to invoke

• User says: "poll a Discord channel", "trigger this from Discord", "watch messages and run a handler".
• The workflow needs a small single-channel inbox, not slash commands or real-time presence.

When NOT to invoke

• The user needs a full interactive bot; use discord.py and the Gateway instead.
• The bot must receive messages instantly at high volume across many channels.

Concrete example

User input:

Poll my Discord alerts channel and send each new URL into the scraper.

Output:

# Copy assets/poller.py into your project, then:
from poller import poll_forever

def handle(message):
    print(message["author"].get("username", "user"), message.get("content", ""))

poll_forever(handle, poll_seconds=5)

The helper reads DISCORD_BOT_TOKEN and DISCORD_CHANNEL_ID from env. Keep channel ids and tokens out of source control; persist last_message_id with [[sqlite-state]] if the poller must resume after restarts.

Pattern to apply

1. Use a bot token from env and grant the bot access only to the channel it needs.
2. Poll GET /channels/{channel_id}/messages with after=last_message_id to avoid reprocessing.
3. Dispatch oldest-to-newest so handlers see messages in natural order.
4. Honor HTTP 429 retry_after and X-RateLimit-Reset-After before the next request.
5. Persist the last processed message id only after the handler succeeds.

Reference: assets/poller.py.

Source

Distilled from production use across the author's automation projects. v1.0.0. See also: [[sqlite-state]], [[telegram-alerter]], [[rate-limit-budget]].

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