Issue with Discord bot authentication in Python

[Liam_25Meditation]

I’m developing a connect four game bot for Discord using Python, but I’m facing issues with authentication. Interestingly, the exact code runs smoothly on another computer, but fails on this one, even though I have the same libraries installed.

Here’s the code snippet:

# Required imports
import discord
import random
from discord.ext import commands

perms = discord.Intents.all()
perms.members = True
bot = commands.Bot(command_prefix='!', intents=perms)

# Variables for the game
player1 = ""
player2 = ""
current_turn = ""
game_completed = True
game_grid = []

winning_combinations = [
    [0, 1, 2],
    [3, 4, 5],
    [6, 7, 8],
    [0, 3, 6],
    [1, 4, 7],
    [2, 5, 8],
    [0, 4, 8],
    [2, 4, 6]
]

@bot.event
async def on_ready():
    total_servers = 0
    for server in bot.guilds:
        print(f'Server ID: {server.id} Name: {server.name}')
        total_servers += 1
    print(f'Bot is active in {total_servers} servers')

@bot.event
async def on_message(msg):
    if '!connectfour' in msg.content:
        global player1, player2, current_turn, game_completed, game_grid
        await msg.channel.send('Who would you like to play against?')
        
        try:
            response = await bot.wait_for('message', 
                check=lambda m: m.author == msg.author and m.channel == msg.channel, 
                timeout=20)
        except asyncio.TimeoutError:
            await msg.channel.send('You ran out of time')
        else:
            if game_completed:
                game_grid = [":blue_square:" for _ in range(9)]
                current_turn = ""
                game_completed = False
                
                player1 = msg.author
                player2 = response.mentions[0]
                
                # Displaying the game board
                board_state = ""
                for i in range(len(game_grid)):
                    if i in [2, 5, 8]:
                        board_state += game_grid[i]
                        await msg.channel.send(board_state)
                        board_state = ""
                    else:
                        board_state += game_grid[i]
                
                # Randomly selecting the starting player
                starter = random.randint(1, 2)
                if starter == 1:
                    current_turn = player1
                    await msg.channel.send(f"<@{player1.id}> goes first")
                else:
                    current_turn = player2
                    await msg.channel.send(f"<@{player2.id}> goes first")
            else:
                await msg.channel.send('A game is currently in progress')

bot.run('YOUR_BOT_TOKEN_HERE')

I’m encountering the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "discord/http.py", line 300, in static_login
    data = await self.request(Route('GET', '/users/@me'))
  File "discord/http.py", line 254, in request
    raise HTTPException(r, data)
discord.errors.HTTPException: 401 Unauthorized (error code: 0): 401: Unauthorized

The above exception was the direct cause of the following exception:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "mybot.py", line 96, in <module>
    bot.run('TOKEN_STRING_HERE')
  File "discord/client.py", line 723, in run
    return future.result()
  File "discord/client.py", line 702, in runner
    await self.start(*args, **kwargs)
  File "discord/client.py", line 665, in start
    await self.login(*args, bot=bot)
  File "discord/client.py", line 511, in login
    await self.http.static_login(token.strip(), bot=bot)
  File "discord/http.py", line 304, in static_login
    raise LoginFailure('Improper token has been passed.') from exc
discord.errors.LoginFailure: Improper token has been passed.

Why does it work on one computer but not on the other? What could be causing this authentication issue?

[Tom_Artist]

Had this exact problem migrating my bot between dev environments. It’s usually config issues, not code problems. Check if your working machine loads the token from a .env file or environment variables - this one might not have that setup. Different Python versions can also mess with string encoding. I wasted hours debugging once only to find Python 3.9 vs 3.11 was causing weird character encoding issues with my token. Print your token string length and compare it between machines - should be identical character count. Also make sure your system locale settings match on both computers.

[John_Clever]

Your token’s probably corrupted or formatted wrong on this machine. I’ve seen this before when copying tokens between systems - invisible characters sometimes sneak in during copy/paste. Just regenerate a fresh token in Discord’s developer portal instead of reusing the old one. Also double-check there’s no extra characters or whitespace around the token string. Could also be that your working computer runs a different discord.py version that handles token validation differently. Run pip freeze on both machines to make sure you’ve got identical library versions.

[Mia92]

you’re using a hardcoded placeholder instead of your real bot token. did you replace ‘YOUR_BOT_TOKEN_HERE’ with the actual token from discord’s developer portal? the working computer probably has it stored in environment variables.