In the last few years, we have had a lot of users create chat bots that do all sorts of things ranging from moderation to loyalty points. We will attempt to keep bots in the mix while making decisions about how our product should act, especially in terms of rate limits, and preventing malicious actors.
We often do not have a full picture of what the developer landscape looks like, and are requesting that you help provide us with that information. If you notice your messages from a bot account not going through for example, it may be that we detected it as a spam bot, and are blocking it’s messages because we’re not aware of it’s purpose.
In order to make better decisions about how to identify and allow for non-malicious bots, we’re asking you to add any and all bots to a form. This will do several things:
- Increases number of unique recipients of whispers
- Increases burst capacity of sending whispers (ie per second and per minute max)
- Increases chat rate limit from 20 to 50 in a 30 second window.
- Small tweaks to various filters where they apply to automated chat messages (ie spam filtering)
Most importantly, this helps us identify your bot accounts, so we can better service you guys when making decisions.
Obviously there is a risk to doing this, if your bot account was compromised in some way. In order to qualify for this change, you must enable two factor authentication on the bot’s account.
We will review these to ensure that malicious actors are not abusing it. Based on feedback and usage, we’ll be moving this to the developer portal as a self-service and more nuanced product, but we’d like to kick start it this way to get off the ground. To check if an account is marked as a bot, please refer to the is_known_bot
and is_verified_bot
fields in https://api.twitch.tv/kraken/users/39141793/chat?api_version=5 (replacing the user_id field appropriately), but we expect to look at this in a (roughly) weekly cadence.
If you have any questions, please note them below, and I will update accordingly.