How to recognize new subscribers and then change their status

client.on sounds like you are using a library, so refer to that libraries documentation. I personally don’t use a library for my bots (beyond WS for connection handling) so to “listen” for a sub I parse the relevant message(s) in chat.

By “listen” I mean “listen/read in chat like how you would as a human reading chat”

So I “listen” for USERNOTICE messages for Subscriber events

Sounds similar to what I do elsewhere so that looks fine.