Mass channel.follow events being received

Over the pass few days I’ve noticed that we have started to get large dumps of channel.follow events for some users. The followed_at on these messages are all within seconds of each other, and the messages are being delivered nearly the same instant as the followed_at date. I did some checking and the user who created this subscription did so back at the end of January, so I don’t believe that it is related to suddenly subscribing to this particular event.

I’d like to get a bit more insight on what’s going on here, and if this is something that is working as expected. Right now we get several hundred over the course of a few seconds and we end up rate limiting because this traffic pattern looks suspicious. But if this is normal operating procedure, then we’ll have to make some changes on our end to accommodate.

I’d appreciate any insight on what’s up!

Someone follow botted the channel you are monitoring.

It’s a “issue” on Twitch, were idiots mass spam a channel, either for notification annoyance or to boost a follow nuimber for some reason.

And for the follow’s EventSub topic it’s up to you to determine how, if any, mitigation you put in place.

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Ahhh, interesting. Thank you. I didn’t realize that this was actually a thing. That also sheds some light on why the number of followers we’re being notified about is largely consistent.

I saw that the usernames were unique, but didn’t think to go and check to see if they were “legitimate” accounts.

We’ll work it out on our end on how to properly handle this.

Thanks again!

Well for most of them you can’t tell if legit or not.

Some may have a created at of today
Others will be stolen/hacked accounts.
And yeah most of them will appear to be “normal” names for fred_111 fred_123.
The people doing this do a lot of work to make the accounts look legit for the most part

Depending on what you use the data for will determine the mitigation if any that works best, but for the most part you’ll have to suffer the DOS from Twitch…

Twitch itself does peridoically do a clean up of such accounts.

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