I’m developing a Discord bot with discord.py and I’m facing an issue with message keyword detection. Currently, my bot only responds when the specific keyword is placed at the beginning of the message. I need it to trigger when the keyword appears anywhere in the message, not just at the start.
For instance, if someone sends “hello there my friend” and my keyword is “friend”, the bot should still respond. At the moment, it only works if the message starts with “friend hello there”.
Is there a method to enable the bot to check the entire message for the keyword, regardless of its position? What would be an effective way to implement this?
wrap your keyword check in a try/except block. discord.py throws random errors when it hits emojis or weird unicode characters in messages. my bot crashed constantly until i added error handling around message parsing.
Built a similar bot two months ago and hit weird edge cases with substring matching. Main problem was accidental triggers from compound words or common letter sequences. Your ‘friend’ example would match ‘boyfriend’, ‘girlfriend’, ‘unfriendly’ - creates confusing responses. Word boundary regex helps but doesn’t fix everything. What worked better was combining basic string detection with context filtering. Check if the keyword exists, then make sure it’s not inside code blocks (triple backticks), not part of a URL, and doesn’t have alphanumeric characters right before or after. Also watch message length - single words or short messages need different handling than full sentences.
Three years with Discord bots here - hit the same problems early on. The .in method works for basic detection, but you need context sensitivity. Keywords pop up where you don’t want responses - code blocks, URLs, or when people talk about the bot itself. I added message type filtering to ignore those patterns. Also, some servers have quote bots that repeat messages, making your keyword detection fire multiple times on the same content. A simple per-user cooldown timer stops spam responses when people keep using trigger words.
Performance matters when you scale up. Learned this the hard way when my bot hit larger servers. Checking every message with regex or multiple keyword searches kills performance during busy periods. Cache your frequently used patterns and add basic filtering first. Skip messages that are too short or filter by specific channels if that’s all you need. Rate limit your responses too - users hate bots that spam reactions on every message with common words. Try preprocessing message content before keyword detection. Strip out mentions, URLs, and special characters first. Makes matching way more reliable and stops false triggers from formatted text or random links containing your keywords.
Keyword detection gets messy fast - multiple servers, different responses, user permissions. I’ve built dozens of Discord bots and hit the same wall every time. The logic just spreads everywhere.
Don’t cram it all into your bot code. Use external automation instead. Set up a flow that takes Discord messages, runs keyword rules, and sends back responses.
Your bot stays lightweight - just forwards messages and handles what comes back. The automation does the heavy lifting: matching, context checks, cooldowns, response routing.
Perfect for different keywords per server, role restrictions, or time-based triggers. Update the flow instead of redeploying your bot.
Visual workflow lets you see all keyword rules at once. Modify them without touching discord.py code. Way more flexible than hardcoded handlers.
Use the in operator to find keywords anywhere in a message: if 'friend' in message.content.lower(). The .lower() makes it case-insensitive so it’ll catch ‘Friend’ or ‘FRIEND’ too. Watch out for partial matches though - you’ll get false positives like ‘friendly’. If you need exact word matching, go with regex instead: import re then re.search(r'\bfriend\b', message.content.lower()) to match whole words only.
The in operator works but gets messy fast with multiple keywords or complex conditions. Hit this exact issue last year building internal bots.
Here’s what happens - you start with one keyword, then suddenly need 10 keywords, different responses for each, case variations, and maybe some should only trigger for certain users. Your code becomes a nightmare of if statements.
I automated the whole thing instead. Built a flow that listens to Discord messages, processes them through keyword matching with regex patterns, and triggers different responses based on rules you configure visually.
No more hardcoded keyword lists in your bot code. Just update your automation flow when you want new keywords or behaviors. Way cleaner than managing everything in discord.py.
The automation handles message processing, keyword detection with proper word boundaries, and smart routing based on which keywords matched. Your bot just becomes a simple webhook receiver.