I run a game dev team that is developing our first game that integrates with Twitch. It’s run as a channel like other “Twitch Plays” games.
We have a static IP at our office and have received multiple temporary chat bans in the past few weeks. Although there is no reason given when a ban occurs I’m guessing it’s due to spam protection. This is disrupting my development team’s ability to test and iterate on our game. When doing internal playtests we have up to 10 people playing the game from this same IP and also run a bot that allows the players to interact with the game in a variety of ways.
How can we avoid these temporary chat bans? Can we get our IP whitelisted by Twitch to remove or reduce the restrictions?
Make sure the bots are a moderator in any channels where they are posting messages. Whitelisting is available for individual accounts: Have a chat/whisper bot? Let us know!
Thanks. I just filled out the form a few minutes ago so hopefully that will help on the bot side.
However, we’ve also been banned when our bot wasn’t running, so it does seem like there is some sort of general rate limit we’ve exceeded when trying to test our game with solely human users. It seems to be happening at the IP level because when it happens no one can chat. We’re all logged into different Twitch accounts.
We see the message “Sorry, we were unable to connect to chat. Reconnecting in 2 seconds.” when sending chat messages.
We’re probably hitting the limit you described which is unfortunate because we want to do team-wide playtests internally on the platform. I suppose we could write our own simple chat server that fakes Twitch IRC responses for testing to avoid this but I’d prefer to test on the platform to ensure our integration is working correctly in the real environment.
The message limit is per connection, although if any single connection breaks that limit the resulting ban is based on IP so will block all users from that IP, regardless of which connection was the one to break the limit. While testing you’ll want to make sure that all users are mods in the channel that you’re testing in, and that none of you go past the limit or it will block all of you.