Understanding Events and Parameters

Discord is constantly sending you events

Let's start with something you do every day.

You open a server, click on #general, and you see people chatting. Messages appear on your screen the moment someone sends them.

Have you ever wondered how they get there?

Here's what actually happens. Every time someone sends a message, Discord sends a small notification to your Discord app that says, roughly:

"Hey - something just happened. A new message was created. Here are the details."

That notification is called an event. Your Discord app receives it, reads the details, and draws the message on your screen.

An event is simply: something happened, plus the details about it.

You never see events yourself - they happen silently in the background, hundreds of times a day. But they are always there.

Events are not just messages

New messages are the most obvious example, but Discord sends an event for almost everything that happens around your account:

• A message is sent, edited, or deleted

• Someone reacts to a message with an emoji

• A member joins or leaves a server

• A role is given to or taken from a member

• Someone changes their nickname

• A channel is created, renamed, or deleted

• Someone joins or leaves a group DM

• A user changes their username or avatar

Every single one of those is an event.

Where Nighty comes in

Nighty listens to the exact same events your Discord app does.

Custom Features let you say: "When THIS event happens, do THAT."

That's the core idea. Everything else in this documentation is just detail on top of it.

Important: a Custom Feature does nothing until its event happens. If you build a feature that reacts to new messages, it sits quietly doing nothing until somebody sends a message. This is normal - it's not broken.

Every event carries parameters

An event isn't just a signal saying "something happened." It also carries information about what happened.

Think of an event as a delivered package. The package tells you something arrived. But what's useful is what's inside the box.

The things inside the box are called parameters.

When someone sends a message, the New Message event arrives carrying these parameters:

Parameter	What it is
message	The message itself
user	The person who sent it - you, a friend, a stranger, or a bot
channel	Where it was sent - a text channel like #general, or a DM
guild	The server it was sent in (only if it wasn't a DM)
member	The sender, as a member of that server (only if it wasn't a DM)
me	You - your own Discord account. Always available

Those are the pieces of information Nighty hands you to work with.

We say Guild where Discord's interface says Server. They mean exactly the same thing. Discord's own developers call servers "guilds," and Nighty follows that. Whenever you read guild in Nighty, think server.

A parameter is not one value - it's a container of details

This is the part that clicks for most people once they see it.

A parameter isn't a single piece of text. It's a container holding many details inside it.

Look at the message above on your screen right now. Discord is showing you several separate details at once:

• The avatar on the left (User → Avatar)

• The name in bold (User → Name)

• The content of the message (Message → Content)

Discord got all of those out of the parameters that came with the event - and you can get them out too.

You'll see these details written in blue boxes in the Custom Features Tab, like this:

You never have to type them by hand - the editor gives you an Expression Builder and inserts them for you. Read it as "the content detail, taken from the message parameter."

The mental model: the event tells you what happened. The parameters tell you who and where and what was involved. The details inside each parameter are the actual values you use.

Parameters that sound the same but aren't

Some parameters have similar names and it's easy to mix them up. This section is worth reading twice - most beginner confusion lives right here.

user vs member - the important one

Both refer to the same person. The difference is which side of them you're looking at.

user is the general Discord account. Every human (and bot) on Discord is a user. This is who they are everywhere, across all of Discord. Their username, their avatar, their account age. A user is always available, no matter where the event happened.

member is that same person inside one specific server. A member is a user who has joined a server, and being a member comes with server-specific things: their nickname on that server, the roles they have there, when they joined, and what can be done to them there - kick, ban, timeout, add role, remove role.

member only exists when the event happened inside a server. If someone sends you a direct message, there is no server involved - so there is no member, only a user.

An example. Imagine your friend Anna:

	As a user	As a member
Who	Anna, the Discord account	Anna, in this particular server
Username	annabanana	(same — it comes from the user)
Nickname	❌ doesn't exist	✅ "Anna 🌸" - but only on this server
Roles	❌ doesn't exist	✅ Moderator, Verified
Can you kick them?	❌ no such thing	✅ yes, from this server
Available in a DM?	✅ always	❌ never

Anna is one person. In a server she's both a user and a member. In your DMs she's only a user.

How to choose:

• Want their username, avatar, ID, or an @mention? → use user

• Want their nickname, roles, join date, or to kick/ban/timeout them? → use member

channel vs server_channel vs group_channel

All three are places where messages live. They differ in what kind of place.

Parameter	What it means	Works in
channel	Any channel at all - the general one	Server channels, DMs, group DMs
server_channel	A channel that belongs to a server	Servers only
group_channel	A group DM with several people	Group DMs only

channel is the safe general choice. Use server_channel when you need something that only server channels have - a topic, a category, server-specific settings.

message vs message_before_edit vs message_replied_to

These show up on message events and each points at a different message:

Parameter	Which message it is
message	The message the event is about
message_before_edit	What that message looked like before it was edited
message_replied_to	The older message this one is replying to, if it's a reply

So on a Message Edit event, message is the new version and message_before_edit is the old version. Comparing the two is how you build something like an edit-logger.

"before" and "after" parameters in general

Whenever something changes, Nighty gives you both versions, so you can compare them:

• Nickname changed → old_nick and new_nick

• Channel renamed → old_name and new_name

• Channel topic changed → old_topic and new_topic

• Member changed somehow → member_before_update and member

• User changed somehow → user_before_update and user

me - always there

Every single event carries a me parameter: your own Discord account.

It doesn't matter what happened or where - me is always available. Use it when you need your own name, avatar, status, friend count, or server count.

Not every parameter is available every time

This is the number one reason a feature "doesn't work" for beginners.

The parameters you get depend on where the event happened.

Compare the same New Message event in two places:

A message in a server's #general:

✅ message ✅ user ✅ channel ✅ guild ✅ member ✅ me

The exact same message, sent as a DM:

✅ message ✅ user ✅ channel ❌ guild ❌ member ✅ me

There's no server, so there's no guild and no member. They simply aren't in the box.

Some parameters are conditional in other ways too. message_replied_to only exists if the message is actually a reply to something.

Rule of thumb: if a feature works in servers but seems to do nothing in DMs, you're almost certainly using guild or member somewhere. Switch to user and channel, which always exist.

Special events

These two are different - they don't come from Discord at all.

Event	Fires when
Repeat Action	On a timer you choose. "Every 60 seconds", "every 10 minutes." Nothing has to happen on Discord at all.
Custom Feature	When another Custom Feature triggers it on purpose. You decide which parameters get handed over.

Repeat Action is for anything you want to happen on a schedule - post a message every hour, check something regularly, send yourself a reminder.

Custom Feature lets you split a big automation into smaller reusable pieces, and have one call another. You'll get a full page on this later.

(And remember: every event above also carries me.)