OpenClaw Custom Emoji Discovery Reaches Discord, Slack, and Telegram Through One Gate-Aware emoji-list Action

Custom emojis are how communities actually express tone on Discord, Slack, and Telegram — but OpenClaw agents couldn’t discover them. Discord and Slack had already shipped emoji-list message actions; the problem was that the capability was invisible to the model itself.

What was broken

The message tool’s reaction emoji parameter carried no description at all, so the agent never learned that custom-emoji syntax existed or how to name one. Discovery actions existed at the adapter layer but weren’t surfaced to model-facing tool schemas — a capability gap, not an implementation gap.

What changed

The merged feature makes discovery explicit and gate-aware:

• the message tool’s emoji parameter now documents per-channel custom-emoji syntax, naming emoji-list only when that channel’s gateway actually advertises the action;
• Discord’s emoji-list defaults guildId from the current conversation and returns reaction-ready {name, identifier} entries; and
• Telegram gains matching custom-emoji discovery, unifying behavior across all three channels with screenshot proof in the merge record.

Operator guidance

• No configuration is required; after updating, agents can enumerate and react with custom emojis natively on channels where the action is advertised.
• If your agent instructions previously hardcoded emoji names or avoided reactions entirely, revisit those prompts — reactions become a usable expression channel now.
• The gate-aware design means partial deployments degrade cleanly: channels without the action simply don’t advertise it to the model, so no defensive prompting is needed.