Allow Bots to Send Ephemeral Messages Outside of Interactions

[CarsonKopec]

Right now, bots can only send ephemeral messages as part of interaction responses (like slash commands or buttons). It would be extremely helpful if bots could send ephemeral messages independently.. for example, in response to events like new messages or automatic detections (e.g., language translation, moderation warnings, tips, etc.).

This would allow bots to provide useful, non-intrusive feedback directly to users without cluttering public channels. It could work similarly to normal messages but include an ephemeral: true flag and a user_id for the intended recipient.

Use cases include:

• Automatic message translation visible only to the message author
• Quiet command responses in busy channels
• Temporary info or warnings only visible to the user

This would significantly improve UX and open up new design patterns for bot developers.

[Qjuh]

Pretty sure that's not gonna happen because:

• it's way too abusable
• it already is possible for responding to commands, so your second bulletpoint is invalid
• there's no guarantee the user it's sent to will even see it, as they might be in a completely different channel or not even in discord at all and the ephemeral message will be gone when they next are

[CarsonKopec]

Totally fair points, and I get where you’re coming from - but I still think there’s room for this feature if it’s implemented with the right guardrails.
• Abuse concern is valid, but honestly, any message system can be abused (DMs, pings, embeds, etc.). Discord already rate-limits bots and could easily restrict how often ephemeral messages can be sent, or require them to be tied to some user-triggered context.
• On the “already possible via interactions” point — yeah, that works great for slash commands. But the idea here is to support things that aren’t explicitly triggered by users. For example, if someone types in a different language and the bot auto-translates for them silently, that’s not something they manually invoked, so it wouldn’t be covered by the current system.
• As for messages disappearing before the user sees them, that already applies to current ephemeral interactions too. Bots and users work around that today by prompting with a retry or fallback DM. Adding this feature wouldn’t make it worse — it would just open up more UX-friendly options.

I think if Discord made this opt-in and scoped per-user visibility carefully, it could be a really useful addition without introducing chaos. It’s definitely not a must-have, but it’s something that could unlock some neat bot behaviors.

[MashaDaDev]

Automatic message translation visible only to the message author
I can see something like this being usable and good, but it'd also be easily abusable imo
Quiet command responses in busy channels
Is that not how ephemeral slash commands normally work when initiated by a user though?

[CarsonKopec]

Yeah, I totally agree that automatic translation visible only to the author could be super useful — and yeah, like anything, it could be abused if left unchecked. But I think with smart limits (like per-user cooldowns or requiring message context), it could be made safe while still improving the user experience. Especially in large servers, it’d keep things cleaner without sacrificing functionality.

As for quiet command responses — you’re right, ephemeral slash commands do already work that way when initiated by users. My suggestion is more about enabling similar behavior outside of interactions — like if a bot detects a trigger word or auto-handles something in a message without the user explicitly running a command. Basically, giving devs a way to create more intuitive and less spammy experiences, even when the user didn’t type /command.