very-cool-group

Intents are a feature of Discord that tells the gateway exactly which events to send your bot. Various features of discord.py rely on having particular intents enabled, further detailed in its documentation. Since discord.py v2.0.0, it has become mandatory for developers to explicitly define the values of these intents in their code.

There are standard and privileged intents. To use privileged intents like Presences, Server Members, and Message Content, you have to first enable them in the Discord Developer Portal. In there, go to the Bot page of your application, scroll down to the Privileged Gateway Intents section, and enable the privileged intents that you need. Standard intents can be used without any changes in the developer portal.

Afterwards in your code, you need to set the intents you want to connect with in the bot's constructor using the intents keyword argument, like this:

from discord import Intents
from discord.ext import commands

# Enable all standard intents and message content
# (prefix commands generally require message content)
intents = Intents.default()
intents.message_content = True

bot = commands.Bot(command_prefix="!", intents=intents)

For more info about using intents, see discord.py's related guide, and for general information about them, see the Discord developer documentation on intents.

Wildcard imports are import statements in the form from <module_name> import *. What imports like these do is that they import everything [1] from the module into the current module's namespace [2]. This allows you to use names defined in the imported module without prefixing the module's name.

Example:

>>> from math import *
>>> sin(pi / 2)
1.0

This is discouraged, for various reasons:

Example:

>>> from custom_sin import sin
>>> from math import *
>>> sin(pi / 2)  # uses sin from math rather than your custom sin

• Potential namespace collision. Names defined from a previous import might get shadowed by a wildcard import. • Causes ambiguity. From the example, it is unclear which sin function is actually being used. From the Zen of Python [3]: Explicit is better than implicit. • Makes import order significant, which they shouldn't. Certain IDE's sort import functionality may end up breaking code due to namespace collision.

How should you import?

• Import the module under the module's namespace (Only import the name of the module, and names defined in the module can be used by prefixing the module's name)

>>> import math
>>> math.sin(math.pi / 2)

• Explicitly import certain names from the module

>>> from math import sin, pi
>>> sin(pi / 2)

Conclusion: Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those! [3]

[1] If the module defines the variable __all__, the names defined in __all__ will get imported by the wildcard import, otherwise all the names in the module get imported (except for names with a leading underscore) [2] Namespaces and scopes [3] Zen of Python