Since the new whisper system is getting revamped to a different system soon™, I’d like to already request that a channel context (which channel the whisper originated from) be added to whispers.
That way bots can utilize whispers, offloading bot responses and commands into whispers so that chat gets less spammy. Just picture a giveaway through chat with zero “!raffle” messages.
Agreed, that would be VERY useful for some bot usages!!
Also, to clear up, if there are future plans to use whispers outside of the channel page as well, then a channel context could be sent as a null value. That way this wouldn’t put any restrictions on what Twitch can do with the whisper system.
All that’s needed is that the context is provided when a whisper is sent from the channel page/chat.
I would also like to see group whisper like “/w [Username1],[Username2] [MESSAGE]” users separated by comma.
This would also be good for bots, because if you’re sending the same message to a group a people it would limit the messages sent therefore not bogging down chat.
Doing this is just bad: (Plus I think there is a certain amount a whispers you can send in certain amount of time)
“/w [Username1] test message”
“/w [Username2] test message”
“/w [Username2] test message”
“/w [Username3] test message”
“/w [Username4] test message”
If you were to look at allowing multi-targets like that, theres gonna be a whole load more spam…
Todays spam of choice “this is a automated message please send 5 residentsleepers to chat”
lovely…
BarryCarlyon
People who make spam bots are going to do that regardless if there is/isn’t a group whisper feature, so I don’t see that as a valid reason not to do group whispers.
Actually, why not to use normal channel msg? If this “message” is interesting to a group of users, sending it to channel will prevent same future requests for some time.
p.s. as example:
If this is like: “!my_points” - sending a 5-users-list of points for 5 users isnt looking “good”, you need to send only 1 user`s points to a single user, so you need 5 different messages to 5 different users. And if its like “!song” - better to announce it once on channel rather then sending a single message to each user who requested it.
Well, I really like the new private messages - it was long time overdue. But I see a few problems in the implementation because chatters are able to bypass all the chat restrictions and the only way to block the messages does not affect the chat. This system is rather new and most trolls haven’t thought about the possiblities of that. However once they did that, we will be in deep trouble. 
1st scenario:
If I wanted to troll someones chat the first step would be to make the moderators ignore me. Because once they ignored me I can spam the chat as I want because there is nobody that can stop me from that. Or if they do not ignore me, I would keep them busy by sending a lot of useless private messages to fill their chat. Another problem is, ignoring and unignoring people is a pain as you have to type in everything manually especially when the chat moves fast or the sender is in another chat. You can’t even see who is ignored and who is not. BTW. when will this feature finally be added?
2nd scenario:
Instead of posting e. g. “boob request” or other insults in chat, people can just send them via whisper to the streamer. Moderators can’t do anything about it which means that the streamer has to stop the game to ignore single accounts. If it is just one, all right. If there are a few dozens, it will be a pain in the butt. Besides that, just because they are ignored doesn’t mean they are banned from the chat and the other way around. Once you have ignored them and you forgot to keep them from your chat, see 1st scenario.
Solutions atm are just to use another chat client. This will make you ignore all private messages, but the downside is, you cannot use the possibilities of this and even if someone sends you something private that is important, he will never know that you haven’t read it because there is no receiving confirmation. Another solution would be to use a customized chat that implements for example all the filters regarding links, blacklisted words, messages you can receive within a certain time, all the things we have in chat with our bots now. The problem is, most streamers don’t have the possiblity to implement that or people that could implement that for them. I built a system like that and believe me it is not as trivial as it sounds with the poor tools we have now.
So my suggestions would be:
Then the private messages will be awesome. 
You missed my point.
I think whispers are great, but I think mass whispers with a comma delimited target list is a bad idea.
About 1st:
It was said, that separated ignores are planned, so it would be solved.
About 2nd:
a) You can turn on “do NOT recieve from strangers”
b) Who is capturing twitchs chat as it is? Most of streamers use some special clients, which (i am sure for 99%) will provide you option about displaying or not /whispers. Capturing twitch chat as it is looks same as you will stream your facebook messages and complain that some of them are too private - its MADE for being private.
You are missing my point. I WANT people to use it and don’t turn it off, because you can improve the chat and the user experience by a lot. Restricting the functionality because of the poor implementation will lead to a point where this is system is as abandoned as the Twitch messages.
Twitch is no social network like Facebook. There is no equal relationship between streamers and viewers. Viewers are following streamers, that’s it - the “do not receive messages from strangers” is as useless as the other folder and even worse as the messages will just go to /dev/null without any notice. This setting protects you from nothing and is just annoying when you miss important messages.
When you turn off the functionality because of a few idiots you will not be able to use it for good measures e. g. when a bot tells you your rank or server informations or what ever. And as you don’t get any confirmations if it works or not people will just go back to chat messages and forget everything about this. So instead of throwing a half-baked new feature on Twitch, please improve it before everybody turn it off.
More than half of the streamers I know use the dashboard and most of the moderators do it anyway because they have to see what the normal user sees.
Important information from strangers? You mean you as a streamer, who shows his twitch chat as it is, use /whispers to send\recieve IMPORTANT information and all viewers will see it?
If you turned it off - than you know that it IS turned off and you have to add bot to your list.
Did you notice that nobody is talking about displaying the chat on stream except you? This has nothing to do with the things I said above. I wasn’t talking about showing the chat on screen, you just don’t connect to the group server, connect anonymous or drop the private messages. I was talking about the chat that the streamer is reading to interact with his audience.
“Strangers” does not mean the streamer don’t know the people (e. g. his moderators), it just means that they don’t follow that person. Following a bot so that he can send you for example TS3 login information is for most viewers not really obvious. On Twitch messages it is not that bad as they will still find the message in the other folder. Not sent private messages will not even give you an error message nor inform the receipt that somebody wanted to contact him. Explaining this to your audience when messages can not be send will be a pain and as a result of this devs and viewers will stop using this feature. And that is what I want to avoid.
What I think makes sense:
I’m not sure if the other suggestions make sense to be implemented into the general site though. Maybe it would be a good option for a third-party client, if you really want something like that, but in general it would be confusing.
Restricting whispers to a channel would mean the whole system isn’t for global private messages that you can receive in any chat anymore. Switching a channel would stop you from continuing conversations and possibly make you miss important messages. It might work for some applications like talking to a bot in the channel you are in, but for other applications (that are not restricted to a channel, or where you want to converse with a bot while not being in the same channel context) it would be equally as confusing as having to follow someone so you can receive their whispers or adding them to some other kind of whitelist.
Stopping users you timeout in a channel from whispering from that channel is clearly not a good idea. A mod shouldn’t be able to prevent users from sending any kind of private messages just because they have a certain channel open.
Stopping users you timeout in a channel from whispering to that channel is also kind of weird. For one, how do you decide a whisper goes to that channel? A user might be in more than one channel. Based on where it’s send from? That has the same problem as in the paragraph above. You could maybe sort of guess what channel a message is associated with, but for blocking messages I don’t think that really works if it’s intended to stay a global messaging system between users.
I appreciate the problem of preventing spam via whispers while still allowing legitimate messages, but I feel like adding these options would make the system way too complicated to understand. Allowing whispers for everyone or a whitelist, and then ignoring users that spam you (maybe also based on keywords) seems like the most sensible way right now.
So, you are a streamer and you are recieving /w spam and cant read chat due to it. But your moderators or\and friends use /w to send you important messages. But you dont want to turn /w off from strangers and press follow ONCE for each of your friends\mods. But they dont want to use other ways to send messages like non-whisper chat\skype\whatever else to not make you follow them. Some AI will solve this and filter spam from important.
Mods appear to have a bypass to the strange/checkbox already I have experienced. Don’t know if thats a thing but I have observed this
So, only left for AI to detect if user is your friend but you dont follow this user 
You have to divide the whole feature in two different use parts:
How can we use that feature?
I would be really love to use this to reduce text messages in chat that are not interesting for everybody e. g. the already mentioned raffle/bankheist/rank messages. Other than that it could also be used to give away data e. g. login data to gameserver etc that should be only available to a certain usergroup. For this to work the user has to accept whispers in general. It could also be used to add features to Twitch that they are still missing e. g. timeout people and give other moderators/broadcaster the ability to see who timed someone out and for how long or communications between moderators and broadcasters without leaving the chat.
But atm you cannot even tell if a user that sends a whisper to your bot is a subscriber because you cannot determine the channel he is sending from. If you have a bot running in a single channel, that is fine as you might get around it by querying the API. If your bot is running in multiple channel you can already stop thinking about using this feature at least for querying your bot.
How can we prevent the system from being abused?
If a user makes a bad experience with this system, he will activate the “do not allow strangers to send you messages” checkbox and this whole feature will be more or less useless in the long run. That people will follow your bot just to take part of a raffle is rather unusual and not really intended. Again Twitch is not Facebook! There is no benefit in following other people that do not stream. And as a streamer you will have to explain that to your audience - I’m a moderator in a lot of channels and a lot of them are not following me but I’m sure they have no problem when I send them something over the whisper instead of Twitter/Twitch or TS. Generally forbid people to whisper to you because you are not following them already breaks this whole functionality in big parts as you don’t have a fallback or even an error message.
To keep the whispering widely accepted it is important that people can easily filter messages and add/delete people on their “list”. This is not given so far. You have the ignore function which is a pain to use as I already said above. People might try to contact you and you as someone who wants to receive this message do not even have the ability to tell if this user is ignored or not. And the whitelisting with a command? A lot of people are already confused when they have to click a button. Forcing them to type text messages with full names of other people is far away from userfriendly.
Binding the whisper to a channel context would at least give moderators the ability to prevent spamming in their moderated channel for a certain time. It would not restrict the receiving of messages for the user, it would just stop the sending of messages in or to this channel for a certain time - but that is no problem, they can send their message from any other channel. Without this or a similar functionality, streamers will pretty fast deactivate this feature to prevent people spamming their chat and this will kill a lot of potential of this feature.
Again, I love this I want everybody to use it because you can do awesome stuff with it, but it is essential that it is revamped before it becomes as abandoned as the private message system already is.
This thread has totally derailed…
When a user disables whispers, or ignores another user, then all that will happen is that they won’t get any responses from that user. If they whisper that user then that user would still get their whisper.
So if you have whispers disabled then there’s no need to follow any bots unless you specifically want to get responses back from the bot.
Sorry, ignore my first message, I missunderstood you.
However, you mentioned the whole problem. Let’s say moobot times someone out then the reason is not important for the other users but it is important for the guy that was timed out. Sending this information via whisper is not reliable enough that means you have to go back to regular messages that fills the chat with for most people unimportant information.
On the other hand sending commands via whisper to moobot is useless because you wouldn’t be unable to get the channel context unless the user adds that which makes it more complicated. That means you will only accept commands via IRC that fills the chat for no reasons.
I just wanted to add the suggestions above to the suggestion to add the channel context to make this functionality more usable for more people. BTW. when I check the “do not accept whispers from strangers” I still get all whispers even from people I was never in the same chat with. I don’t know if this is broken ATM.