Glossary

Plain-language definitions of terms used across this wiki and the Discord API.

Application - your bot's identity on Discord, created in the Developer Portal. It has an application ID and a bot token.

Token - the secret password for your bot. Anyone with it controls your bot. Never share or commit it. Athena expects it prefixed with Bot .

Gateway - the live websocket connection over which Discord pushes events (messages, joins, reactions) to your bot in real time.

REST - the request/response HTTP API you call to do things (send a message, ban a user). Athena's RequestHandler manages it.

Intent - a switch telling Discord which categories of gateway events to send you. Fewer intents means less traffic. See Intents.

Privileged intent - an intent (GuildPresences, GuildMembers, MessageContent) that must be enabled on the portal and, for large bots, approved by Discord.

Shard - one gateway connection handling a slice of your guilds. Big bots run many shards. Discord routes a guild to a shard by guild_id % total_shards.

Cluster - a process running a group of shards. Very large bots run many clusters across machines.

Snowflake - Discord's ID format, a numeric string that also encodes a creation timestamp. Every structure exposes createdAt derived from it.

Guild - a Discord server.

Member - a user as seen inside a particular guild (with nickname, roles, join date). The same user is one User object referenced by many Member objects.

Channel - a place messages or voice happen. Athena models each kind as a class (GuildTextChannel, GuildVoiceChannel, ThreadChannel, ...).

Interaction - what Discord sends when a user runs a slash command, clicks a button, picks a select option, or submits a modal. You must respond within three seconds (or defer() to extend).

Slash command - an application command invoked by typing /name. Built with CommandBuilder.

Component - an interactive message element: buttons and select menus (V1), plus containers, sections, galleries, and more (V2).

Modal - a pop-up form with text inputs (and file uploads) shown in response to an interaction.

Ephemeral - a reply only the invoking user can see, sent with flags: MessageFlags.Ephemeral.

Ratelimit - Discord's cap on how often you can call an endpoint. Athena queues and retries automatically.

Cache - in-memory copies of objects Discord has shown your bot, stored in Collections. See Caching and memory.

Collection - Athena's Map subclass used for every cache, with helpers like find, filter, map, random.

Partial - a stub object when only an ID is known (the full data was never cached). Guard with instanceof before using full fields.

Bitfield - a compact set of flags (permissions, intents, message flags). Query with has, modify with add / remove.

Entitlement / SKU / Subscription - Discord's monetization objects: a SKU is a product, an entitlement is a user's ownership of one, a subscription is the recurring billing.