openclaw - 💡(How to fix) Fix feat(discord): treat role mentions as explicit mentions for mention-gated agents [1 participants]

Problem

When a Discord role (e.g. @dev-team, @engineers) is mentioned in a guild message, agents assigned to that role do not receive the message. The mention gate drops it because role mentions are not counted as explicit bot mentions.

@everyone and @here have the same issue — they do not trigger agent responses.

Root Cause

In the Discord inbound handler, explicitlyMentioned only checks message.mentionedUsers:

const explicitlyMentioned = Boolean(
  botId && message.mentionedUsers?.some((user) => user.id === botId)
);

Role mentions are already tracked and used for ignoreOtherMentions filtering:

const hasAnyMention = Boolean(!isDirectMessage && (
  (message.mentionedUsers?.length ?? 0) > 0 ||
  (message.mentionedRoles?.length ?? 0) > 0 ||
  message.mentionedEveryone && (!author.bot || sender.isPluralKit)
));

But hasAnyMention does not feed into wasMentioned for the bot itself. The message is dropped by the mention gate before any plugin hook (message_received) fires, so plugins cannot work around this.

Expected Behavior

If a message mentions a Discord role that the bot user is a member of, the bot should treat it as wasMentioned = true and process the message normally.

Similarly, @everyone should trigger all agents that have channel access.

Proposed Fix

After the existing explicitlyMentioned check, add role and everyone detection:

// Existing
const explicitlyMentioned = Boolean(
  botId && message.mentionedUsers?.some((user) => user.id === botId)
);

// New: role-based mention detection
const mentionedViaRole = Boolean(
  !isDirectMessage &&
  botMemberRoleIds?.length &&
  message.mentionedRoles?.some(r => botMemberRoleIds.includes(r.id))
);

// New: @everyone/@here detection
const mentionedViaEveryone = Boolean(
  !isDirectMessage &&
  message.mentionedEveryone &&
  !author.bot  // prevent bot @everyone from triggering other bots
);

// Feed combined result into mention gate
const effectiveExplicit = explicitlyMentioned || mentionedViaRole || mentionedViaEveryone;

The bot's role IDs (botMemberRoleIds) should be available from the guild member cache or fetchable via GET /guilds/{guild_id}/members/{bot_id}.

This is a ~10 line change. All the data (mentionedRoles, mentionedEveryone) is already computed — it just needs to be wired into the mention gate.

Optional: Config guard

A config flag could make this opt-in:

{
  channels: {
    discord: {
      guilds: {
        "<guild_id>": {
          mentionRolesAsExplicit: true,  // default: true
          mentionEveryoneAsExplicit: false  // default: false (safety)
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

Use Case

Multi-agent setups where a human wants to address a group of agents at once:

• @dev-team standup please → all agents in the dev-team role respond
• @agents status report → all agent bots respond
• @everyone meeting in 5 → reaches humans AND agents

Environment

• OpenClaw version: 2026.3.x
• Channel: Discord
• Config: requireMention: true (default for guild channels)