Character limit on SlashCommand strings

[ZeldaFan0225]

So today I unsuspectingly wanted to add another sub command to my slash command and i was prompted with this error:

DiscordAPIError: Invalid Form Body APPLICATION_COMMAND_TOO_LARGE: Command exceeds maximum size (4000)

and the friendly people in Discord Devs told me I can't have over 4000 characters total in my command.

I'm trying to keep my descriptions short but since I have a few options with choices while still having them as helpful and detailed as possible to easily use my bot I unfortunately reached that limit.
Then the theoretical limit that is always being talked about (25 sub command groups and 25 sub-commands which is 625 sub commands total) came to my mind and I calculated the limit. So 4000 characters divided by all the possible commands being 625 is 6.4 characters per sub command. WITHOUT ANY ARGUMENTS.
So you need to fit all your arguments plus descriptions plus choices into those 6 characters per sub command which would result in only being able to have 4 arguments with each description and name only having one character...

I'm really struggling to fit a helpful and descriptive description and argument names into those few characters.

Also I tried putting all related commands into one top level command with sub command groups and this would require me to create a separate top level command to keep the descriptions as they are now to keep the current user friendlyness.
But taking those new sub commands and creating a new top level command would reduce user friendliness and terminating the whole point of using sub commands (making commands more organized).

I ended up removing tips such as "The role shouldn't be managed and above me".
Now user get prompted with this error when they already went through the pain of setting up their beautiful multi-line embed and formatted everything making them frustrated (i even got feedback that the more detailed descriptions help get it right the first time.
I was planning on adding another sub command with the same characters as the other sub commands
but I guess I wont...

I will attach my shortened command below (which now barely fits into the limit). It has 9 out of the 625 (theoretical) sub command and already is scratching the limit.
I'm probably the first and only person to run into this issue of not being able to fit the strings into the 4000 characters but a different system (such as 1500k per sub command) or a raised limit or even a good alternative (in comments) would be appreciated.

(I'm very sorry if this is all over the place, this is my first discussion about a problem I ran into and english isn't my native language)

Btw when speaking about top level commands I mean the ones limited to 100 global ones.

Command: https://gist.github.com/ZeldaFan0225/8101ef0c4454ac92c9416658b25c95b9

[sawa-ko]

I have the same problem.
The limit is very little, in the case of having subcommand groups for example.

Since you have to be putting all the short descriptions and if it is not enough you are forced to create a subcommand with the same name but with something different.

For example command-name reached the limit by the group of subcommands so now you are forced to create a command command-name-2 in order to achieve your goal. Because you don't create another command with a different name if the group of subcommands is about the same thing as the previous subcommand.

So my idea is for that limit to be individual per subcommand in a command.

You can see this example:

- command = 4,000 limit
- command 
  - subcommand = 4,000 limit
  - subcommand-group = 4,000 limit
    - subcommand

In this way it is possible to use all the subcommands that a command can have calmly and without worrying about having names, options, command descriptions. Because for now what you have to do is have all those properties much lower than their real limit (32 characters, 100 characters, etc).

Also, it would be great if they explained why that limit, and I hope they can pay attention to this issue and be able to reach a solution.

[ckohen]

Reminder that its only the name, description, and value properties of the command and its subcommands that count.

Though to be fair, I have a command with 2 subcommand groups each with 3 subcommands (and 18 total options) and I'm at 2526 characters.
This command looks quite large due to displaying subcommands, so collapsing subcommands might be a prereq for an increased character limit.

I have a proposal that may be rather unique to my command structure but I'm guessing its not so here we go:
Maybe some type of top level shared_options property for repeated options in different subcommands / groups. Ideally there would be a property to select which shared options each subcommand uses so that we can easily create a CRUD style system without so much repetition in the payload.

E.G.

{
  "name": "crud",
  "description": "perform some type of crud operation",
  "type": 1
  "shared_options": [
    {
      "name": "id",
      "description": "the id of the thing to perform crud on",
      "type": 3,
      "required": true
    },
    {
      "name": "value1",
      "description": "the new value for value1",
      "type": 3
    },
    {
      "name": "value2",
      "description": "the new value for value2",
      "type": 4
    }
  ],
  "options": [
    {
      "name": "create",
      "description": "create an entry",
      "options": ["value1", "value2", "value3"]
    },
    {
      "name": "read",
      "description": "read an entry",
      "options": ["id"]
    },
    {
      "name": "update",
      "description": "update an entry",
      "options": ["id", "value1", "value2", "value3"]
    },
    {
      "name": "delete",
      "description": "delete an entry",
      "options": [
        "id",
        {
          "name": "view_entry",
          "description": "whether to display the entry after deletion",
          "type": 5
        } 
      ]
    }
  ]
}

This should in theory save a lot of space in large commands

[ZeldaFan0225]

That's a great idea! For my command structure you can see in the gist something like arguments which you can give more than 1 time would be great since I'm asking for ~20 different roles and I could do that with one argument which can take 20 roles or one argument which can be used a set amount of times... For people who do not use arguments that require 20 times the same input type/ the same argument, the limit could be moved to no "global" limits for top level commands and groups but the X000 character limit being applied to the sub command. (If no sub command is present apply it to the top level command)... This would allow actually using all of the 625 advertised sub commands.

[Nykloon]

They already answered this in a past DDEVs event, see here: https://youtu.be/e5m_Sx9zyb0?t=1886 Tl;dr: not many people run into this limit so they won't do anything

If not many people run into it they may as well just increase it, it won't hurt. I had to split my command into two commands to set and unset the configuration of a server through my bot just to bypass the limit, which is not very user-friendly. I'd really appreciate more information on this.

[ZeldaFan0225]

They already answered this in a past DDEVs event, see here: https://youtu.be/e5m_Sx9zyb0?t=1886 Tl;dr: not many people run into this limit so they won't do anything

If not many people run into it they may as well just increase it, it won't hurt. I had to split my command into two commands to set and unset the configuration of a server through my bot just to bypass the limit, which is not very user-friendly. I'd really appreciate more information on this.

You are welcome to ask again but their answer was clear, only a few people use slash commands properly (I.e. use sub commands and sub command groups) and are thereby kinda punished for doing so by a validation system that has not been properly designed, yes the client has to load more information but it really doesn't matter if it loads the strings in 2 commands or in one it's the same amount

Imo this limit and the way it is enforced is stupid but there's not much we users can do

[QuantumToasted]

I'm running into the 4000 limit already with less than 20 total subcommands on a general purpose configuration command. The advertised "625 subcommands per root command" seems a little insane given the fact that if one were to even attempt that, they would be allotted approximately 6 characters per subcommand for name, description, and values(?). I can understand not wanting to overly bloat single commands for stuff like client rendering of commands, but this limit just seems straight up too-low for most commands if you are also expecting bot developers to actually document the commands and their options.

Sure, splitting said /config command (like /config xxx and /config yyy) into /config-xxx and /config-yyy would work, but then why allow so many subcommands in the first place if the total character limit is so low?

[Olzie-12]

I still believe this limit should be increased. I've unfortunately reached this limit by accident, now im having to go out of my way to resolve this problem.

Personally, there are a lot of limitations with slash commands. they rushed this.

There is some concerns i do have when changing to slash commands. Some of the problems:
1 Only one attachment per option
2 Cannot have next line in options
3 Cannot have permissions for sub commands
4 You can only have one sub command group per subcommand.
5 You specially need to reply to the command to acknowledge it, sometimes you don't always wanna reply to the command.
6 Base command cannot be executed if u have a subcommand
7. Not able to attach files to commands on mobile
8. You're limited to 4000 characters in total for all ur commands.

Please, if im wrong. please correct me.

[miramallows]

please, increase this limit to 6-8k, or decouple it by subcommand or subcommand group:

it's incredibly inconsistent with the rest of the limits:

• user inputs in modals can have 6k characters.
• you can have 25 subcommand groups and 25 subcommands, i.e. 625 subcommands per command.
• you can have 2,048 characters in your footer's text
  yet, you can't have more than 4,000 characters combined across all subcommands.

i'm now forced to either split some of the settings off to a secondary command, causing confusing user experience. i tried to cut text already, but unless my descriptions were just a few characters long (i.e. "denyrole" as opposed to "set roles where this feature will be disabled for"), it's just not possible to fit it in the limit.

i also considered making it so that each of these settings were done via non-command interactions, but settings involving @user input can't be done graciously outside of slash at the moment, and modals are still missing a lot of input types.

slash commands work well in terms of user experience if done right - this is just one of the limits that need a raise 🙏

[t-wy]

Quoting my previous comment

This character limit also reduces user-friendliness when migrating all existing commands (no character limit) (e.g. /foo, /bar) to be under multiple command groups (character limit: 4000) (/game1 foo, /game1 bar) to accommodate other features due to functionality expansion.

Built-in auto-suggestion also does not work well for the mentioned /config-xxx /config-yyy workaround, as typing /config xxx would return no results.

Also, it is unreasonable not to have raised the limit when localization was introduced. If the character count comes close to 4000, the incentive for localization becomes weak as there probably exists a language in which several names after translation result in more characters, thus exceeding the limit. Some dumb workarounds include setting the subcommand description (invisible from the client) as something like ., or cutting the number of characters in the description. This compromise should not be there at all.

[ZeldaFan0225]

Basically

[Olzie-12]

Has this been changed? Recently only encountered this problem one and never had it again and I keep adding more commands.

[TwilightZebby]

The character limit for Slash Commands was increased yea, as per #6668