June '16 status of whisper rate limit

Hello,

While searching the dev site I’ve seen a number of posts regarding whispers, but everything regarding the rate limit of them is from last year. I was wondering if there has been anything more recent in the works for developers to be able to send more than ~2 messages a second. I don’t imagine sending more messages than this constantly, but user perception is a big driving factor in whether they want to use a product or not. My goals are to keep messages quick for viewers, but the moment I have 10 messages in my queue a couple of people will be waiting 5 seconds for their reply. If I’m spread across 10 channels, my bot is perceived as slow and unresponsive. Needing to send a few messages in burst isn’t currently possible. Does anyone know if this whisper rate limit is being discussed as something that can be changed, or will it remain as a spam deterrent and something that has to be lived with?

Thank you.

We don’t announce any future plans but will keep you updated when we make any changes. I’m curious about what you’re communicating using whispers that frequently. Is it giveaways or some other use case?

As I am using my bot as a backend javascript learning project, I’m not quite certain of the path it will go yet. I have tossed a couple ideas around and they get hung up on whisper lag as a deterrent. The project I would like to work on would be a simple RPG, “!attack” -> “You have hit the goblin for 4, it attacks back for 3.” That would be more or less obnoxious with a handful of people playing in a channel. The big picture goal for that however would be channel vs channel PvP, have streamers coordinate their users into a fun rivalry. Going that route I could stagger the viewer pairings so that if a round is 30 seconds, someone’s round would be at :00, another at :01, etc. But (in the best case scenario of having a decent number of channels/viewers participating) introducing lag into the responses would give some people an advantage or cause single rounds of combat to take more time than people would like.

The second use case would be a system similar to what saltybet does, with the focus being “get people active in chat and staying in your channel.” Earn points for being active and in the chat, which could be bet against other viewers for things like “will the streamer win the CS:GO set”, managed by the channel mods and the points could be used to "buy " things, like requesting a specific song be played or the streamer use a certain character in the next game they play. In this case, whispers would be a nice unobtrusive way for status updates.

I guess I just have a theme of wanting participation that is gracefully unobtrusive to a channel’s chat, and whispers seem like a great way to do this… Except for the rate limit.

The rate limit was implemented as a temporary fix for curtailing large-scale spam. We’re still working on a robust solution that will reduce the amount of reliance on this, but it is still needing a lot of tuning before we’re willing to increase limits across the board.

Excellent, I understand. Thank you for the reply and update.

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