Slash command migration

TL;DR: Use slash commands. Text commands are being phased out by Discord.

At the end of August 2022, Discord is going to forbid almost all verified bots from reading message contents. One of the bots affected by this change is Crom. To prepare users for this change, you are no longer able to trigger Crom using text prefixes like crom au or ?? 173.

Slash commands

Slash command panel

Crom fully supports slash commands. Type / into your chat window to open a panel listing all the slash commands you can run. Every text command has a slash command variant, and some new features can only be used with slash commands.

Previous text commandNew slash command
?? [query]/search [query]
crom search [query]/search [query]
crom help-
crom random/random
crom lc/latest
crom au [name]/author [name]
crom au/self
crom link/unlink/link
crom info/settings [name]
crom edit [name] [value]/settings [name] [value]
crom report [feedback]/feedback [feedback]
-/fullsearch [query]

Many commands have an optional argument called wiki to fetch from a wiki other than the server's default. Optional arguments can be entered by pressing their name in the "Options" panel.

You can't make edits to your slash command response, but you can self-delete slash command responses on desktop. Right-click the response you want to delete, select "Apps", and click on "Delete command".

Mention Crom

Usage of mention commands

As a short-term alternative, Crom also supports text-style commands that start with a bot mention. This syntax will stop working at the end of September 2022.

  • Instead of typing in crom ..., just ping @CROM ....
  • The ?? ... syntax for searching articles won't be supported, but you can use @CROM search ... or @CROM s ... instead.

FAQ

Why did you remove text commands?

It's a decision that comes from Discord. At the end of August 2022, Discord blocked Crom from reading message text entirely.

Why did you do this a month before you had to?

Switching command syntaxes is hard! Making this change early gave me the ability to alert users when they type in a text command. If I waited until the end of August, Crom would've simply stop responding to text commands, and it would've seemed like the bot was broken.

As of August 2022, Crom no longer warns users when text commands are used.

How do I manage permissions for slash commands?

Slash command permissions are managed separately from user permissions. See Discord's blog post on slash command permissions for more details.


Crom only needed access to message contents to parse and respond to commands in messages, and has never stored or logged non-command contents. See the privacy policy for more details.