Block Old Clients/Show a message and force them to upgrade

[applebee1558]

While all these new interaction features are nice, and the majority of users do have a client that is new enough due to them being enabled in a/b experiments, there’s still a lot of people who refuse to update their mobile clients. They end up with a client months old that don’t have support for these new interactions.

Some people simply don’t know how to update, or others are intentionally not updating because their client mods (although breaking the discord tos) haven’t updated to the latest client version.

An issue this poses is that people with these old clients end up complaining that my bot is broken, and then pull up examples of other bots who haven’t moved to interactions. They then just want me to fix my bot to work with older clients. Using both reactions and buttons is pretty ugly in general.

I wish discord can enforce client versions so issues like these don’t happen all the time. While it is an issue with the end user, it ultimately causes people to remove my bot because it doesn’t work with their older clients.

[ghost]

I use an old version of the Discord Android mobile app - without client mods - because new versions of the app have many regressions that Discord has failed to fix for over a year. I understand that new features are missing, and it is frustrating that I can't use them; I also sometimes get hit by antispam because the old version of the app does things differently than the new one. However, it is my choice as an user to not update if the new version introduces bugs that I don't want to have.

[applebee1558]

Then maybe somehow send a message to every old client letting users know that buttons and slash commands don’t work properly on their client if a button is shown? I’ve had a lot users complain that my bot “isn’t working” because they couldn’t see the interaction buttons from my regular prefixed commands. This resorts me to use reactions and avoid any of the new features that are much cleaner and easier to interact with (buttons have ratelimits per interaction, and can allow you to send ephemeral messages)

Currently, the client doesn’t give any info or complain that the version is outdated.

[ghost]

That'd be a good idea. I'm not sure how feasible it is, but showing a "this message contains elements that your client is too old to display" would be really nice, even if just added to the message content.

I’ve had a lot users complain that my bot “isn’t working” because they couldn’t see the interaction buttons from my regular prefixed commands. This resorts me to use reactions and avoid any of the new features

As a bot dev, it's not up to me to fix other people's issues caused by them using an old version of the client (or client mods, or whatever it may be). If that's what people expect of you, maybe try setting different expectations?

[applebee1558]

I guess I could set higher expectations of my bot users and just get rid of the small minority of people with old clients. Let’s wait to see if discord has any stance on this.