Guides

What does an LFG bot need access to? A privacy-friendly Discord LFG bot

Many Discord bots ask for far more than they need. Here is what access an LFG and voice lobby bot actually requires, what to be wary of, and exactly what LobbyForge can and cannot see.

Why it matters

Every bot you add can see whatever Discord lets it see, in every channel it can reach. A bot that asks for Administrator, or for Discord’s privileged intents, can read far more of your server than it needs to. If that bot is ever compromised, or simply changes what it does, that access comes with it. The safest permission is one the bot never had.

The three privileged intents

Discord gates its most sensitive data behind three “privileged intents” that a bot has to request explicitly:

• Message Content — reading the text of messages.
• Server Members — receiving your full member list, and every join and leave.
• Presence — seeing members’ online status and what they are playing.

An LFG bot needs none of them. Lobbies run on buttons and dropdowns, which Discord delivers to the bot directly whether or not it can read messages. And a lobby roster only needs to know who is in a particular voice channel, which comes from voice states — a normal, non-privileged intent.

What LobbyForge can see

• Your server’s channels and roles, so it can create lobby channels in the right place and show you channel pickers.
• Voice states: who is connected to which voice channel. This is what the live roster is built from.
• The interactions sent to it: when someone presses a LobbyForge button or picks from its dropdowns, Discord tells the bot who did it.

What LobbyForge cannot see

• Message content. The bot never requests it, so it cannot read what people write.
• Your member list. It does not use the Server Members intent, so it is never sent the list.
• Presence. It does not know who is online or what they are playing.

These are not promises not to look: the bot does not have the access in the first place, which is a stronger guarantee than a policy.

Permissions, and why each one is there

• Manage Channels — create and delete lobby voice channels.
• View Channels and Connect — work with the channels it creates.
• Move Members — move players into their lobby.
• Send Messages and Embed Links — post the panel and lobby posts.
• Read Message History — find and update its own lobby posts.
• Manage Roles — hide private lobbies and grant access to them, and manage the optional per-game notification roles.

Notably absent: Administrator, and Create Instant Invite. Lobby join links point at the voice channel inside your server, so the bot never creates invites that could let strangers into it.

What is stored, and for how long

Closed lobbies, including who hosted and joined, are deleted 90 days after they close. Signing in to the dashboard only reads your Discord username and server list. The full inventory — every table, what it holds and why — is in the privacy policy.

A checklist for any bot you add

• Does it ask for Administrator? A well-built bot rarely needs it.
• Does it need message content to do its job? For button-based bots, the answer is usually no.
• Does it need your full member list, or only the people who use it?
• Does its privacy policy say what it stores and for how long?

Ready to set one up? Start with the LFG setup guide.