How to make Discord bot tag specific users in messages

[JollyMusic3]

I’m building a Discord bot that needs to tag users other than the person who sent the command. I keep running into issues when trying to make the bot mention someone.

if message.content.startswith("+joke"):
    target_user = bot.get_user_info(user_id)
    await bot.send_message(message.channel, target_user.mention + ' got pranked!')

Every time I test this I get an error:

AttributeError: 'generator' object has no attribute 'mention'

This error shows up whether I include a user mention in the command or not. My imports are:

import discord
from discord.ext.commands import Bot
from discord.ext import commands
import asyncio
import random

What’s the right way to get user objects and mention them in bot responses?

[SilentSailing34]

That generator error’s from using an outdated method. I ran into the same thing when I started with discord.py - the API’s changed a lot between versions. Don’t bother parsing user IDs manually. Just let Discord handle mentions directly in your command:

if message.content.startswith("+joke"):
    parts = message.content.split()
    if len(parts) > 1 and message.mentions:
        target_user = message.mentions[0]
        await message.channel.send(f'{target_user.mention} got pranked!')

When someone types “+joke @username”, the bot automatically parses the mention and you grab it through message.mentions. Way more reliable than extracting user IDs manually and fetching user objects.

[ClimbingLion]

yeah, get_user_info is gone now in the newer discord.py. try using fetch_user() if they’re not cached, or just get from guild members with message.guild.get_member(user_id). the guild method’s way better for mentions too.

[DancingBird]

Your problem is get_user_info() returns a generator, not a user object. Use get_user() instead, though it’s deprecated in newer discord.py versions. Here’s how to fix it:

if message.content.startswith("+joke"):
    target_user = bot.get_user(user_id)
    if target_user:
        await message.channel.send(f'{target_user.mention} got pranked!')
    else:
        await message.channel.send('User not found')

Make sure user_id is an integer, not a string. If you’re parsing it from message content, convert it with int(user_id). Also consider switching to the commands framework with @bot.command() decorators - it’s way cleaner.