Why am I only receiving 50 messages with MessageManager.fetch()? - discord

Question

I'm in the process of debugging the /purge command for my Discord bot.
My intention is to fetch the entirety of a text channel, and delete any amount of messages, by calling the TextChannel.bulkDelete method multiple times, since that method has a limit of deleting 100 messages at a time. This is my code:
async purgeDelete(
channel: TextChannel,
amount: number | undefined,
target: GuildMember | undefined,
keyword: string | undefined
): Promise<number> {
// Most confused about this line: Am I doing the right thing?
const messages = await channel.messages.fetch();
const twoWeeksAgo = new Date();
twoWeeksAgo.setDate(twoWeeksAgo.getDate() - 14);
const purgelist = messages.filter(message => (
(!target || message.author.id === target.id)
&& (!keyword || message.content.includes(keyword))
&& this.resultMessage?.id !== message.id
&& message.createdAt > twoWeeksAgo
));
let purgeAmount: number;
if (amount === undefined) {
purgeAmount = purgelist.size;
} else {
console.log(purgelist.size, messages.size);
purgeAmount = Math.min(amount, purgelist.size);
}
const slicedPurgelist = purgelist.first(purgeAmount);
const partitionedPurgelist = [];
for (let i = 0; i < slicedPurgelist.length; i += 100) {
partitionedPurgelist.push(slicedPurgelist.slice(i, i + 100));
}
await Promise.all(partitionedPurgelist.map(messages => channel.bulkDelete(messages)));
return purgeAmount;
}
I'm pretty sure the only line that matters is the fetch() call. When called in my program, the API is giving me 50 messages. Is that intentional? I know there is an option for limit, but that only goes up to 100. If there is any workarounds to this, please let me know!

Answer 1

The Discord API has a hard limit of 100 messages per GET request. Unfortunately, this is a hard limit you can't bypass, and is intentional on Discord's part.
Furthermore, fetching the entirety of a text channel is probably a bad idea, especially with larger servers which could have 100k+ messages per channel.
A "sort-of" workaround is to use the before param in FetchMessageOptions plus a loop to continue fetching messages. See below for an example:
const messages = [];
const messagesToFetch = 1000
while(messages.length < messagesToFetch) {
// Handle first run
if(!messages.length) {
const msg = await channel.messages.fetch({ limit: 100 })
messages.push(msg)
continue;
}
// Fetch messages before the oldest message in the array
messages.push(await channel.messages.fetch({ limit: 100, before: messages[0].id }))
}