I have a couple of questions about Extension Whitelist, hope you can help me with that!
Is there any way to update Whitelist without creating a new version? That would be awesome…
Is it allowed to have a public extension ( without whitelist ) but control who can use it through code? For example, requesting a token to verify if this channel is allowed to use, if not, the extension appears empty or not working.
No, adjusting the whitelist requires a new version and to go through review.
You can limit functionality based on user, but if your extension simply appears empty or not working, with no information whatsoever that they are unable to use it, then they’ll likely report your extension as broken, send you support emails complaining that it’s broken, and just generally give your extension a bad reputation.
Yes that’s true, that can be a real problem. That’s one of the reasons why I didn’t use this system, also because I don’t know if it’s allowed in the terms.
I hope Twitch implements a “live” whitelist editing, it’s really annoying to create new version, re-upload last version, enable it in a channel for review, wait for the review, and publish… only to add users. This process usually take 1-3 days to complete, sometimes it’s really fast, and others you only can just…wait. I don’t know how other developers manage this things.
Most don’t design extensions that require frequent changing of the whitelist. It’s common that extensions are either built for a specific set of channels that infrequently changes, or is always public.
Those who do want a more frequently changing access rights often have a public extension, that’s still functional to all users, but only offers enhanced/additional features for certain users. This way even if some random channel installs it to check it out, they can at least experience the core functionality, and if the extra stuff is premium features then it increases the likelihood that they’ll request access to them where as if they can’t test the extension at all they’ll likely never touch it.
Yes that’s true… and convinient. But there’s some special cases ( like mine )
Just to be clear, in my case it’s not about “premium” features, everything I made for Twitch I offered free. The thing is that the extension shows information about my custom chatbot, and all the actions and information depends on it. If a user doesn’t have my chatbot, there’s nothing “general” or “common”. I can’t make my chatbot public for hosting (money) reasons, so it’s more like a “closed beta” or something like that, even it’s already being used “in production”. I add users when they’re interested while the host can handle it.
For now I think that the best option it’s to keep updating manually, but maybe I should add something public and general for those who doesn’t have the chatbot how you said, that would be a nice approach.