About ephemeral and deferred responses

[dipamsen]

Ways to respond to an interaction

(All info is sourced from Discord Developer Portal - Receiving and Responding and DiscordJS Guide - Response Methods)

Deferred Responses

• Any interaction received by the bot must be acknowledged within 3 seconds. During this time interval, the user is shown a loading state "Sending Command...".
• If 3 seconds are passed without acknowledgement, the interaction will be invalidated, and an ephemeral message "This interaction failed" will be shown to the user.
• This means, that interaction.reply() must be called within 3 seconds of the execute function being called.
• Some commands may take more than 3 seconds to execute. In this case, we can initially acknowledge the response, by creating an initial empty deferred response (this must be created within 3 seconds of execution) by calling interaction.deferReply(). This will act as an acknowledgement, and the user loading state will show a <bot> is thinking... message. It also gives a 15 minute timeframe to perform the execution of the command.
• To actually reply to the deferred interaction, we can use interaction.editReply(), or interaction.followUp(), which will edit the loading state and show the actual response. (This must be sent withing 15 minutes of receiving the interaction.)

Ephemeral Responses

• This is a way to respond to a slash command, such that only the executor of the slash command can see the response.
• By setting ephemeral: true to any response function (reply(), deferReply(), followUp()), the corresponding response will only be visible to the user who initiated the interaction, with a message below, "Only you can see this".

More

• For any interaction, follow up responses can be sent (apart from the initial response) by using interaction.followUp(). This also has a 15 minute timeframe since receiving the interaction.
• The initial response can be edited (also within 15 minutes of receiving the interaction) by using interaction.editReply().

---

(issue in gif.js)

deferReply() call should be moved above fetch to tenor api (gif.js)

  // URL constructed with the provided or default keyword
  let url = `https://tenor.googleapis.com/v2/search?q=${keywords}&key=${process.env.TENORKEY}&client_key=a2z_discord_bot&contentfilter=high`;

+  // Initially acknowledging the command interaction with a deferred reply
+  await interaction.deferReply({ ephemeral: false });

  // Fetching data from Tenor API
  let response = await fetch(url);
  let json = await response.json();
  console.log(json);
  console.log(json.results[0].media_formats);

  // Randomly select a GIF from the response
  const index = Math.floor(Math.random() * json.results.length);

  // Creating an embed to display the GIF in the Discord message
  const embed = new EmbedBuilder().setImage(json.results[index].media_formats.gif.url);

-  // Initially acknowledging the command interaction with a hidden (ephemeral) reply
-  await interaction.deferReply({ ephemeral: false });

  // Following up with the selected GIF embedded in the message
  await interaction.followUp({
    embeds: [embed],
    content: 'GIF from Tenor: ' + keywords,
  });

Also, the comment refers to the reply as "ephemeral", which it is not (as ephemeral: false is set, which is also the default).

---

[supercrafter100]

For clarity reasons, I'd recommend moving interaction.deferReply() all the way to the top of the interaction handling. So it's the first thing that happens. The way you suggested it's sortof inbetween the existing fetching code.

[dipamsen]

Sure, that works as well (I was emphasizing that the call should at least be before the async call.)