Discord bot only replying to initator

Question

I am starting with a new Discord bot using discord.js . I am still learning things but am curious if it is possible to send a reply to only the initiator, not the channel.

Channel.send and message.reply are both public to all.

const discord = require('discord.js');
const client = new discord.Client;
const prefix = '!';

client.once('ready', () => {
  console.log('Ready!');
});

client.on('message', message => {
  if (message.content === 'ping') {
    message.channel.send('Pong!');
  }
});

Answer 1

You can do:

message.author.send("text to send")

To send a direct private message

Answer 2

To dm the person who said the message do

message.author.send("hullo");

To send it to someone else,

let user = client.users.cache.get(`PUT-YOUR-ID-HERE`);
user.send("hullo");

Answer 3

There are 3 ways to respond to a user and i'll explain all three of them. To reply to the user (author) only, you might want to use .reply() method. And this is how you use it:

message.reply("I replied to you :)!");

To send a message to the author in private only, you want to use the author.send() method. This will start a private conversation in direct messages and only your bot and the author will be in this conversation.

message.author.send("This is a private conversation, nobody will ever know about.");

Just to send a message in the channel, use channel.send() .

message.channel.send("This is a regular message, no user is pinged.");