Discord bot only removes first role instead of all assigned roles

[DancingFox]

I’m having trouble with my Discord bot command that’s supposed to remove multiple roles from a user. The code works fine for removing the first role it finds, but then it stops working and doesn’t continue removing the other roles. I can’t figure out what’s causing it to stop early.

I have a list called user_roles that contains role names as strings. When someone uses the !clear command, it should go through all the roles and remove any that the user currently has.

if message.content.startswith("!clear"):
    all_removed = True

    for role_name in user_roles:
        # Loop through each role name
        target_role = discord.utils.get(message.guild.roles, name=role_name)
        if target_role in message.author.roles:
            # Remove the role if user has it
            try:
                await bot.remove_roles(message.author, target_role)
            except discord.Forbidden:
                await bot.send_message(message.author, "Missing permissions to modify roles.")
                all_removed = False
                break

    if all_removed:
        await bot.send_message(message.author, "All roles have been removed successfully.")

What could be causing this behavior where only one role gets removed?

[AdventurousHiker17]

i think ur using an old version of discord.py. bot.remove_roles and bot.send_message are no longer in use - you should use message.author.remove_roles(target_role) and message.channel.send(). that might be why ur bot is acting strange.

[lucasg]

Your code’s crashing because you’re only catching discord.Forbidden errors, but Discord throws way more than just permission errors. I’ve hit this same issue - you’ll get discord.HTTPException, network timeouts, and other random stuff that kills your entire loop. Catch discord.DiscordException instead, or just use a broad exception handler so the loop keeps running. Also check your bot’s role position in server settings - if it’s below the roles you’re trying to remove, operations fail silently sometimes. Your bot needs to be higher up in the hierarchy than the target roles.

[Harry47]

This is probably Discord’s rate limiting kicking in. When you remove roles too fast without any delay, Discord’s API throttles your requests or some operations just fail silently.

I ran into the same thing with my moderation bot. Adding a small delay between removals fixed it completely. Try putting await asyncio.sleep(0.5) after each remove_roles call. Discord’s servers need time to process each role change.

Also, role operations take a moment to propagate through Discord’s systems. I’d check if the role actually got removed before moving to the next one - makes everything more reliable.