New "toast"/temporary-notification component or interaction.

[i0bs]

🍞

This is something we've all seen at least once when traversing websites on the Internet. Toasts. Toasts are a very simple and UX-elegant way of displaying information for a temporary and short time period. Toasts that we've seen on the Internet usually look a little something like this:

A toast in design is pretty simple. You have a bar that usually makes from either left-to-right or right-to-left; and either grows or shrinks in size, an "❌" field to close the toast notification if you'd like to dismiss it before the time period is up, the (option to do an) icon for one, and the contents of the notification itself. I believe toasts would be very beneficial to have on Discord for bot developers to employ for the following reasons:

The benefits

• A more UX-friendly approach of displaying temporary information that does not clutter chat, e.g. ephemeral messages.
• Timed information that can be triggered and easily scaled depending on use cases.
• You could potentially build interaction responses with toasts instead of sending a message, which would put ease to always having to end an interaction with a response for unnecessary API calls where a bot developer does not want to send a message but some notification/alert.
• Opens up a lot of more avenues and possibilities I'm probably not able to think of.

An idea of the design

Discord has a very minimalistic/sleek impressionist-like design that is consistent throughout the platform, and is easily visible wherever you go. It's this design that overall makes the platform very comfortable to look at aesthetically and easy to work/interact with. Because of this, I don't think toasts should be any different. Here would be a potential candidate for how I think they could look and function:

I believe toasts could be very influenceable and beneficial to a lot of developers as mentioned earlier because they also are just another feature that can be utilized to the advantage of one's creativity.

[GamingGeek]

The desktop client actually has toasts (I think it's a recent addition, no clue if it's actually used anywhere) which look very nice and would be awesome to use through interactions

Android also has toasts built into the OS and I believe the iOS client has toasts similar to desktop

[GamingGeek]

Update: They're now used for time outs (native mute feature)

[i0bs]

Guess we shouldn't be relying on this information anymore :(

Hoping that this gets some more attention, would love to see what others think

[Mehgugs]

When I asked about having a response type to indicate a generic success back in july they seemed to want people to use ephemeral messages for things like this, especially if you're sending text in the response. They did however indicate that a generic command succeeded response might be something they would add -- this would be like slack's empty slash command response I imagine -- and potentially use a toast for this.

[Prince2347X]

When I asked about having a response type to indicate a generic success back in july they seemed to want people to use ephemeral messages for things like this, especially if you're sending text in the response.

How about a timer for ephemeral messages?

[i0bs]

I don't feel like ephemerals are the best solution because they have the chance to clutter information in the chat, and chats are a core integral aspect of communicating on the platform. Sure, it's also the place where interaction responses exist, but I don't think forcing developers to send a message to "respond" to an interaction is also a smart solution.

[Mehgugs]

I don't think forcing developers to send a message to "respond" to an interaction is also a smart solution.

This was my point.
I want to send a something really small and generic like: {type: INTERACTION_SUCCESSFUL} and discord show a toast or similar inline to indicate the command has completed. We shouldn't need a whole message for that.

I highly doubt discord would give interactions two avenues to send arbitrary text, but something like I described above would solve your problem for a lot of command use cases. Posting very generic "Command successful" messages does clutter chat needlessly, and I think the argument is a lot stronger in this case.

[amatsagu]

This sounds like one of those options that will make (at least PC) client even more laggy. I think that so far every popup I've seen created lags in no time. Another thing is that can be very dangerous - assume we have some bad bot (or maybe just bot who bugged) and now it would send storm of those popups to people's screens.

I don't see any option it would be good without adding some really hardcore limitations. The thing is that if you hard limit this - it will become useless.

[amatsagu]

PS: If you add option thanks by people would be able to disable popups on their clients then I bet - nearly everyone would disable it in first few days lol.

[dolfies]

I don't see a problem with spam since it has to be in response to a user triggered interaction.

[amatsagu]

You have ability to send private messages that only user who executed command can see. That's already kinda popup.
If you want - you can send short text and then delete it after few seconds.

Discord app is already overloaded which a massive amount of things that statistically - most people doesn't really use. I just don't like adding things that will be used by like maybe 1 out of 1000 people.

[i0bs]

It's not a matter of bloating, it's a matter of offering creative and inspiration for better solutions to bot developers that don't want to cater towards the current methods of handling things like this. Is it really necessary to send an ephemeral for every time you want temporary information? For example, that could spam and clutter up the chat. Or even sending a message and deleting it a few seconds later takes away the practicality of something like an ephemeral as well. It's also just using the API for stuff that later will no longer be deemed relevancy because we're trying to present client-only data. Toasts would be a good alternative in this particular situation.