Pycord message.content is empty

Question

I'm playing around with the Discord API and noticed that I can't access the content of a message.

This is my code:

import discord

client = discord.Client()

@client.event
async def on_ready():
    print(f'Logged in as {client.user}')

@client.event
async def on_message(message):
    if 'My Name' in message.author.name:
        print(f'Author: {message.author.name}')
        print(f'Content: {message.content}')
        print(f'Clean_Content: {message.clean_content}')
        print(f'System_Content: {message.system_content}')

client.run(TOKEN, bot=False)

Note that the token and my username are kept private in this post for obvious reasons.

This is the output that I get, no matter the message:

Author: My Name
Content: 
Clean_Content: 
System_Content: 

As you can see I have also tried the clean_content and system_content attributes. However, none of them show the actual message. I've also tried to use a bot account and that surprisingly worked, but I want this to work with my own account. Is the problem that Discord does not intent private clients to read messages or did I miss something fundamental?

Answer 1

As Matt mentioned, user bots are not supported. However, your problem may be related to intents instead. You might try using the following lines:

import discord

intents = discord.Intents.all()

client = discord.Client(intents=intents)

See also:

• https://docs.pycord.dev/en/master/intents.html#privileged-intents
• https://docs.pycord.dev/en/master/intents.html#message-content-intent

Answer 2

You can solve this by enabling the MESSAGE CONTENT INTENT for your bot in the Discord Developer Panel.

import os
TOKEN = os.environ['TOKEN']
import discord 



# This example requires the 'message_content' privileged intent to function.


class MyClient(discord.Client):
    async def on_ready(self):
        print(f'Logged in as {self.user} (ID: {self.user.id})')
        print('------')

    async def on_message(self, message):
        # we do not want the bot to reply to itself
        if message.author.id == self.user.id:
            return

        if message.content.startswith('!hello'):
            await message.reply('Hello!', mention_author=True)


intents = discord.Intents.default()
intents.message_content = True



def main():
  client = MyClient(intents=intents)
  client.run(TOKEN)


if __name__ == '__main__':
  main()

This is an example with reply in the documentation