Preferred way of detecting a new follower

[zorael]

I’m writing an IRC bot, and I was surprised to see there were no “new_follower” msg-id. What then is the preferred way of detecting a new follow?

I can preemptively hammer https://api.twitch.tv/helix/users/follows?to_id= and look at the “totals” field, monitoring it for changes, but even with a few seconds in between that’s a lot of requests.

Is there a better way?

[Dist]

@zorael

I was surprised to see there were no “new_follower” msg-id.

Twitch chat doesn’t show new follows, so there’s no reason for Twitch to send those events over TMI.

@zorael

but even with a few seconds in between that’s a lot of requests

The API is cached, requesting the same endpoint with the same params more frequently than once a minute is excessive, and can actually lead to bad responses.

As for the best way to handle this, you could use webhooks https://dev.twitch.tv/docs/api/webhooks-guide and subscribe to the follows topic and get a notification each new follow (it’ll send a notification regardless of if the user had previously followed, so it’s still up to you to detect and handle a user spamming follow/unfollow)

[abskmj]

Yes, as @Dist suggested the webhook would be the best way to listen for new followers. Specifically, the below topic. There is a sample implementation at github.com

https://api.twitch.tv/helix/users/follows?first=1&to_id=1337