What "Client" Means in the Unofficial Discord User API Documentation
In this documentation, "client" refers to the official Discord client and the user-side API it consumes — not a bot. The site documents the user side of the Discord API as used by the official client and developer portal, with a focus on user and bearer authentication tokens. If you are building a bot and need endpoints that are officially supported, this is the wrong reference; use Discord's official documentation instead.
The scope of this documentation
The project is a community effort, not affiliated with or endorsed by Discord. Its stated scope is the user side of the API, which is not officially supported. Two consequences follow directly from that:
- Authentication focus. The documentation centers on user and bearer authentication tokens — the credentials a logged-in human account uses.
- Bot endpoints are secondary. Bot endpoints may appear in the pages, but how bots interact with the API is explicitly not the focus.
The introduction also notes that much of the content is based on reverse engineering and educated guesses, so inaccuracies may be present. That is a description of the source material's reliability, not a guarantee about any particular endpoint.
Client vs. bot: what actually differs
| Dimension | User client (this documentation) | Bot client (official documentation) |
|---|---|---|
| Authentication | User and bearer tokens | Bot tokens |
| Official support | No — user-side API is unsupported | Yes |
| Stability expectation | No guarantee; reverse-engineered | Endpoints intended to be stable |
| Primary reference | docs.discord.food | Discord's official documentation |
The practical takeaway: "client" here means the software and credential type a normal user account runs under. A bot is a different kind of client with a different token type, a different support status, and a different documentation home.
The risk you should weigh before building
The introduction states plainly that automating user accounts is against the platform Terms of Service, and that doing so unsafely might get you banned. This is not a minor footnote — it is the single most important constraint on anything you build against the user-side API. If your project depends on a user account continuing to work, treat account loss as a real possibility rather than an edge case.
When to use this documentation, and when not to
Use it when you are trying to understand how the official client talks to Discord — for example, replicating a !userinfo-style lookup from a user context, or studying request shapes that the client itself sends.
Do not use it when you need a bot that will keep working. The introduction directs readers who want bots, interactions, and "a semblance of a guarantee that your API endpoint won't break" to Discord's official documentation. If you believe you have found a bug in a bot-accessible part of the API, the same page points you to the official documentation's issue tracker rather than this project.
If you want to contribute
All documentation lives on GitHub, and the project states that its success depends on community contributions. If you have knowledge of the Discord API, the introduction asks you to consider contributing and points to CONTRIBUTING.md for details. Corrections and improvements are explicitly welcomed — which matters given the reverse-engineered basis of much of the content.