Username changes / Identifying users?

Okay, but what if you are using none of the above. There should be a way for a moderator to this without 3rd party software. They should be able to click on somebodies profile and see their username history. There is a reason why steam does this and the same applies here.

Agreed. The lack of a username history seems like it will open up the potential for abuse and plain old confusion.

To be honest the having an endpoint would just be a convenience thing for me, but there needs to be the ability to check this on the website with no bots, no scripts, and no logs.

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I agree completely something similar to Steam would be optimal.

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Legacy systems are completely broken because of this mess. Something like old username to the right ID could be very useful to convert the last legacy systems.

Theres sth to convert from a current username to ID (Accepts up to 100 names per request): Twitch API Version Update Discussion & FAQ

If somebody has changed his name alread though you’re out of luck it seems as it returns some “bogus” ID

Hi,

I’ve added room-id tags to ROOMSTATE messages.

I’ve added created_by_user_id field to moderator action pubsub messages.

Let me know where IDs are missing that you use. There’s a lot of surface area here that our products don’t rely on needing historic logins (such as the realtime chat moderation logs) that you might use.

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Yes, exactly. I can’t convert usernames to ids in some legacy systems because some people already changed their name.

If only this feature was properly announced and allowed devs a reasonable timeframe to adjust to ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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Great, thanks for the warning Twitch. This is catastrophic.

That is wrong. The _id variable of a user stays the same even when you change the name. That is the idea behind that. Its just that, when querying the old name (that now nobody owns) you get some bogus ID that doesnt lead to some account.

I have tested this earlier today. Used https://api.twitch.tv/kraken/users?login=name&api_version=5 to get the id of some account. Then changed the name of that account and queryed against the new name. Both times i got the same _id value

Does Twitch at least give us the grace of redirecting us to the correct user document if we use the API to query an old username?

Nope

Maybe after they document mod actions for PubSub

The hint was dropped with v5 being ID based…

And then again, with the Username reclaimation policy changes

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Oh we’re supposed to work off hints that Twitch drop us now? Huh…

Yes…

They can’t tell us everything, somethings can’t be released to the public.
Nor can they get ALL of us to sign a NDA.

Look at all the partners ignoring NDA talking about name change on Twitter hours ago before Twitch gave the official announcement.

Personally when v5 was announced and the move to ID’s I thought it was obvious what the long term plan was. (And I tend to store everything by ID reference since prior to v5 some partners were getting name changes anyway)

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I mean, sure they do stuff because they have to, my only issue is that its not “ready on release”. A lot of IRC messages are missing the user-id which simply said breaks 3rd party stuff relying on it for the while. For how long? who knows. It just seems rushed to me for no reason.

Thankfully we identified users by ids for a long time now, but it was still very surprising when they launched it before their own systems even fully supported it. I was informed a few hours prior and would have been unable to rewrite stuff in time if our system hasn’t worked via IDs already

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