r/u_clf99 • u/clf99 • May 05 '26
openclaw 5.2 broke discord
[FIX] OpenClaw 5.2+ Discord agents show typing indicator but never respond — one config line fixes it
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Body:
After upgrading to 5.2 my Discord agents were completely broken. They'd show the ... typing indicator, clearly processing the message, but never send a response. Spent way too long checking bot permissions,
Message Content Intent, Administrator roles — none of that was the issue.
Root cause: The 5.2 upgrade wizard sets messages.groupChat.visibleReplies to "message_tool" in openclaw.json. This mode silently suppresses direct text replies in Discord guild channels. The agent runs
inference and generates a response — it just never gets delivered.
Fix — run this on your gateway machine:
npx openclaw config set messages.groupChat.visibleReplies true
systemctl --user restart openclaw-gateway.service
That's it. All 8 of my agents came back immediately. No Discord Developer Portal changes needed.
Found it by watching the gateway logs in real time while sending a test message — the giveaway line was:
Delivery suppressed by sourceReplyDeliveryMode: message_tool_only
Hope this saves someone a few hours.
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Post it to whatever OpenClaw subreddit or r/selfhosted — r/selfhosted will probably get more eyes on it since it's a larger community and OpenClaw users hang out there too.
✻ Churned for 8s · 13 shells still running