Not getting JOIN/PART messages for channels with lots of users(?)

On IRC channels with a lot of users, somewhere around 10k users, I don’t get the user list when joining the channel (I only get a list of mods), and I don’t get any JOIN/PART messages.

I assume that this is a “feature”… yes?

I was wondering…

  1. Do we know the actual number of chat users that causes JOIN/PART messages to be turned off?
  2. Is there some other way to get this information?

Thanks.

JOIN/PARTS/NAMES cause a heavy burden on our servers, particularly for large channels (currently defined as >= 5000 users). To protect chat from becoming unstable, we decided to limit these for large channels. There is an API: http://tmi.twitch.tv/group/user/{channel}/chatters but make sure you handle errors appropriately, as its not the most reliable API.

We are aware of this issue, and this is one of the issues we want to address going forward. Knowing when people join and leave a room is very important, and we want to make sure that we support that feature for all channels. In the short-term, we decided having people connect and send messages via chat was more important than keeping this feature fully-supported.

That makes perfect sense to me, and thanks for the info. I’ll adjust my app accordingly.