Hi Twitch Staff,
As a broadcaster I would like to give my opinion on this matter.
Basically my bot uses whispers since this week.
This was out of necessity and let me tell you why, my viewers called my bot the “Chat Spam Bot” as a joke.
This is because my viewers can request a couple of commands in chat. (such as amount of hours viewed, how many chat points they have, what thing they can buy with them etc etc) Imagine 3 people requesting these commands within 5 minutes, The bot would spam my chat with at least 15 to 30 lines, making normal chat messages disappear between all the bot’s messages.Normally I have 30-40 concurrent viewers so imagine the madness that unfolds…
The simple solution for this is the whisper feature. Instead of posting the message in chat, it (the bot) sent the information the viewer requested through a whisper. This is both beneficial to the requester and the viewers. The requester can view the information he wants to know without having to keep scrolling up as twitch chat rages on and twitch chat can go on unbothered by bot interference.
I think this being said, I speak for quite a lot of streamers. And for this sole reason we request our bots (with the help of authentication forms as we had a couple months ago) to be able to be whitelisted from the anti-spam measures.
I do agree that having a chatbot that whispers people for no reason without any viewer requests etc should be banned or detected by the anti-spam system. These bots should not be allowed to pass the whitelist background checks.
You want to know what I mean? Check out my profile and type !upgrades or !recruitment when smartcorebot is online to see for yourself.
One way around the spamming in chat is to have a cooldown on the commands. For example, if the !upgrades command has been sent in the past X minutes, don’t repeat the same message. The per-user information could still be sent. This will depend on the pace of your chat though. For showing people their score and rewards, you could have an off-site listing like tinyRewards from tinyBuild or even like Swiftor’s Swiftbot website.
Figuring out reason for whispering would require an incredible amount of context to be accurate. User channels, user actions in each channel, bot channels, etc.
Again, there is a lot of definition to clear up with regards to how developers should be using whispers. We’re working on getting those guidelines out to you.
Is it in the meantime possible to register the bot so it can’t get banned from whispering?
On a channel I’m owner on we’re using whispers to reduce the chat spam (same as SmartCoreGaming) but it got banned today. In the future we’re moving to a different bot with a website but this wil take some time.
These commands had a cooldown of 2 min global and 5 minute user.
Still, creating cooldowns is not the effective way of handling these issues.
People who just joined the chat have a chance of missing out on certain information and as I said, even if these commands would be used every 2 minutes, it would still spam the chat with about 10 lines every 2 minutes. And would bother users that can’t stand the repetition of chat filling up with clutter. Hence giving it the nickname spambot.
Whisper/private messages are the perfect solution for these types of issues and I hope Staff sees it that way. In no way would I in person create any whisper commands that I do not find absolutely necessary.
I’m hoping the guidelines that will be published soon(??) will give us some do’s and don’ts.
As I will again make my point that most channels that implement whisper messages by their bots do it out of necessity, not to be fancy or spam users etc…
Totally wild guess here, but your bot could be hitting the message limit? From Twitch’s irc page:
If you send more than 20 commands or messages to the server within a 30 second period, you will get locked out for 8 hours automatically. These are not lifted so please be careful when working with IRC!
Mods can type 100 messages in a channel before hitting this rate limit. If a message is sent to a room in which your global message count is already too high, you will be disconnected.
