Reliably list a Discord guild's channels from a bot without silently missing channels the bot cannot view (Channel Obfuscation, enforced 2026-11-16)

Documented steps

1. List channels with GET /guilds/{guild.id}/channels. As of Discord's 'Channel Obfuscation for Users and Bots' change (announced 2026-08-12, mandatory for all bots 2026-11-16), this endpoint OMITS ENTIRELY any channel the bot lacks the VIEW_CHANNEL permission on. The returned array is no longer a complete inventory of the guild's channels, and no error is raised to signal the omission.
2. If you need the full channel topology, read it from Gateway dispatches (e.g. GUILD_CREATE and channel create/update events) rather than the HTTP list. Inaccessible channels are still delivered over the Gateway but obfuscated: the channel object's name is the literal string "___hidden___", sensitive fields are nulled or reduced, and permission_overwrites contains a single overwrite denying VIEW_CHANNEL for @everyone.
3. Detect an obfuscated channel by masking the channel object's flags field for the new CHANNEL_OBFUSCATED bit (1 << 17 = 131072). Use a bitwise AND, not equality, since flags is a bitfield. Prefer this over string-matching the name or inspecting overwrites, both of which are unreliable proxies.
4. Do not persist "___hidden___" as a real channel name, and do not key caches or permission calculations on obfuscated objects. Recompute or skip permissions for channels carrying CHANNEL_OBFUSCATED, and treat the HTTP list result as 'channels this bot can currently see' rather than 'all channels in the guild'.
5. Migration: audit any code that assumes GET /guilds/{id}/channels is exhaustive before 2026-11-16; switch full-topology needs to the Gateway; add a CHANNEL_OBFUSCATED check. Separately handle a null application_id on channel objects (nullable as of Discord's 2026-08-05 change) so code assuming it is always a snowflake does not break.