Taxi bot now requires a @mention (and why Discord is not the future)

This blog post will cover a technical change that is necessary for the Taxi Discord bot to continue functioning, and a warning to fellow Melty Blood community members that Discord is not the platform for us to grow. I will break this up into sections.

Hosts must now mention @Taxi to be listed

In order for Taxi bot to list an IP, you must now mention the bot in your message (@Taxi). Nothing else changes, the commands listed in our help bot still work.

For example, previously:

This kind of message will NOT be picked up by Taxi bot moving forward.

Now, change the same message to:

And everything works the same. Sorry for the inconvenience, I hope this is easy to remember. Thanks for using the bot!

I wrote more about this situation and why the change was necessary below.

Why this change is required

In case you are reading for the technical stuff without being familiar with the Taxi project: Taxi is a Discord bot that helps make Melty Blood Community Edition matchmaking easy. It reads all messages sent in designated “matchmaking” channels and posts any valid hosting IP addresses it finds in a “hosts” channel that includes the user and whatever message they sent alongside their hosting IP (such as “midwest games only” or “no ciel”).

This bot was created to re-implement the behavior of a Discord bot previously created by Pluot that was not available to other regional servers (such as the Brazilian and Latin American servers). I’ve recently taken the project further by adding the ability to list hosts from other servers to enable “cross-posted” matchmaking to make it easier to find games no matter where you like to chat.

In order for Taxi to read messages for valid hosts inside registered channels, the bot must access be able to access all message content in a server. This is declared to Discord’s API as an intent, and the ability to read all incoming messages in a server is considered a “privileged intent”. In June 2026, Discord started requiring any bot exposed to more than 10,000 users across all servers be manually approved for these privileged intents. Additionally, this requires an annual re-application to be audited in order to continue receiving this access. Taxi’s presence in several community servers exceeds this threshold and I received a notice to apply for access.

Despite my best efforts to clearly showcase the community’s usage of this bot, unfortunately Taxi’s privileged intents access has been rejected by Discord’s reviewers twice. Their reasoning is laid out here in an email I received:

Based on the information provided, your requested access has not been granted. This is because one or more use cases described or observed can be achieved without the Message Content Intent. Check out our Developer Documentation guide to assess alternative implementations for your use case. Consider using app command options instead (also known as slash commands). App commands are a constantly growing surface with new options and performance improvements being made regularly, as further described in our documentation.

Keep in mind that bots can continue using @mentions, replies to app messages and DMs for user interaction, even if they don’t have the Message Content Intent.

Discord is telling me to change the way Taxi works so that users must explicitly interact with the bot in some way (either via slash command, reply, or @mention) in order to receive message data.

If you are a Melty Blood player today who frequents any of the community-run regional Discords today you’ll understand that the Discord team is essentially requiring the entire Melty Blood community to change how they currently communicate over Discord to satisfy their reviewers. While I’ve chosen an approach that requires the least effort from the user and preserves the intent of the bot (to facilitate easy matchmaking in a busy Discord channel) I suspect many users will be confused and dislike this change, but it is now implemented in order to comply with Discord’s requirements.

Discord is not the future

Dealing with this has given me a new perspective on “Discord fighters” and the dire need to get off of this platform. Any game community that grows to a sufficiently large scale that relies on Discord’s services for matchmaking will be at the mercy of the platform’s auditors to do it their way.

I have two issues with this whole situation:

• It is ultimately their platform and their rules, but considering that the original host tracker bot previously created for the large Melty Blood server back in 2018 has been serving this function with no issues for many years, Taxi should have passed Discord’s review. While that original bot is currently still running, I am concerned that we are days away from it being blocked by Discord as of the time of writing (Discord gives you 90 days to comply or have your token revoked), unless the original developer returns from a years long absence to somehow win over Discord’s reviewers where I could not.
• It’s not possible to know if your use case passes Discord’s review until you reach the user threshold and get approved or rejected. Taxi requiring an @mention to interact with it is a material change to the original pitch for the bot. It’s more cumbersome for users. But if I had known from the outset Discord was going to require this I would have designed it that way from the start. I have been set up to fail. Discord has a “tutorial” on how to use slash commands, components, or @mentions to change how you receive messages, but of course this is just the subtle suggestion that the way we do things is not welcome here.

I am definitely typing this salty that Discord has decided to bring this headache to me while I am busy with other things, but I think that this situation befalling anyone should be the canary in the coal mine that this is not the way. I will be working on a way for any user with a web browser to join the community and play, most likely re-creating the original seemeinmelty site with the ability to matchmake between the site and Taxi’s Discord hosts in order to bridge the gap.

I want everyone who wants to play Melty to find a match quickly, and this has torn it for me.