Summary

Two undocumented behaviors make bot-to-bot Discord messaging very difficult to configure correctly, with silent failures at every step.

Issue 1: guilds.<id>.users is the primary access gate — bot IDs must be added here

When guilds.<id>.users is a non-empty array, it acts as a strict allowlist evaluated before allowBots or allowFrom. Any sender ID not in this list is silently dropped.

Failure message seen in gateway logs:

Blocked discord guild sender ${sender.id} (not in users/roles allowlist)

This is not mentioned in the allowBots documentation. A user following the docs (allowBots: "mentions" + allowFrom) will still get silent failures if their guild has a non-empty users list.

Fix: Add the sending bot's ID to guilds.<id>.users:

"guilds": {
  "<guild_id>": {
    "users": ["human_user_id", "sending_bot_id"]
  }
}

Issue 2: "bot:" prefix in allowFrom is not a valid prefix

It is natural to try listing bot IDs in allowFrom with a bot: prefix:

"allowFrom": ["user:1234567890", "bot:9876543210"]

This silently fails. DISCORD_OWNER_ALLOWLIST_PREFIXES only recognizes discord:, user:, and pk:. The bot: prefix gets slug-normalized and treated as a display name, which never matches since dangerouslyAllowNameMatching is off by default.

Fix: Use bare ID (no prefix) for bot IDs in allowFrom:

"allowFrom": ["user:1234567890", "9876543210"]

Full Working Config for Bot-to-Bot Messaging

"channels": {
  "discord": {
    "accounts": {
      "receiving-bot": {
        "token": "...",
        "allowBots": "mentions",
        "allowFrom": ["user:HUMAN_ID", "SENDING_BOT_ID"],
        "guilds": {
          "GUILD_ID": {
            "users": ["HUMAN_ID", "SENDING_BOT_ID"]
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

Impact

Configuring multi-agent / bot-to-bot setups on Discord requires discovering both of these behaviors through trial and error, with no helpful error messages at any step. Both the allowBots docs and the allowFrom docs should be updated to call out these requirements explicitly.

Environment

• OpenClaw version: 2026.3.24 → 2026.3.28 (both affected)
• Platform: Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
• Use case: multi-agent setup with two OpenClaw bots communicating via Discord mentions