Communication about chat plans. Whispers, Protocols, etc

I am confused. Confused by the way whispers were implemented, and by a number of other decisions, some related to whispers, some unrelated ones.

Now, I’m not opening this thread to discuss any of the specifics, it seems pretty likely to me that you’ve had valid reasons for all of them.

I’m not asking for you to spend half your working day explaining every little thing to the bot developers (all of the ones who frequent this forum, not just nightbot and moobot), but you do have to realize that they provide a vital tool for Twitch streamers to build a community, and you are maintaining the interface that they have to work with.

In my opinion these two othings would be extremely helpful and would help foster active development of 3rd party chat tools which help streamers and consequently Twitch.

  • Provide some kind of roadmap or development manifesto that covers the most important upcoming changes to Twitch chat systems that affect bot developers and other developers of 3rd party chat applications. Instead of replying
    “This is because you don’t know what features we intend on providing in the future.”
    when someone asks about a seemingly odd or contradictory change, you can just tell people what item on the roadmap requires it to be that way (even without going into details) and it will be much more understandable.
  • Document changes to systems that affect 3rd party developers as they happen or before that, and keep this documentation easily accessible, as opposed to having it scattered across different forum discussions

I don’t think I’m being unreasonable, but if I am, someone please tell me.

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We (the developers) are not at liberty to disclose our development roadmaps to the public for a variety of reasons, which is why we’re left in the unfortunate position of saying “if only you knew what we know”. Trust me, it’d be a lot easier if I could just tell you what we’re planning!

We’re trying to get better at documentation, and we hope the community can help us bring it up to speed. We’re trying to consolidate all information developers need at https://github.com/justintv/Twitch-API. We’ve been updating it as we add new features, and we also post thread in these forums to announce upcoming changes (when we can), or announce changes right after they occur (when we can’t pre-announce for business reasons).

If you have any suggestions on how we can better communicate changes, or how we can better the documentation, we’d love to hear it!

Maybe one place to start is to actually answer peoples’ questions, instead of dismissing them with “IRC is not an appropriate technology for providing [unspecified features]” and “you don’t know what features we intend to provide” and just locking the topic without explaining anything.

Disclosing future plans, prototypes and possible features of a large company is often a difficult subject matter. I’m sure they are trying out different things and building different features, but talking about them can be problematic for many reasons.

I’m pretty sure they’re disclosing as much as they are able to.
Beyond that I don’t see how hard it could be to speculate over what actual functionality they are intending for this system, and as such see how the IRC protocol was not built for that kind of features.

I actually do think you’re being unreasonable.

This is 3rd party development, and we’re at the whim of Twitch. All they should and can do is make it as easy as possible for us, by announcing changes, and in the best way not restricting what we want to create.

Unless 3rd party development is something Twitch/Amazon want to specifically focus a lot of resources on, then demanding those resources will only hurt 3rd party developers on Twitch.

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