The ‘twitchnotify’ IRC tag will be removed this month

We announced in Subscriptions Beta Changes that the twitchnotify IRC tag was deprecated. It now has a removal date of May 24, 2017. Please make sure that you are using USERNOTICE for subscription and re-subscription messages and refer to the forum thread linked above.

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TO THE DEATH OF TWITCHNOTIFY!

throws party

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Excellent news. Thanks!

Excellent, now it will have to ask for channel owners to provide application data to continually recognize the number of subscribers, scoring the server requests … Thanks…If they dont want a lack of reaction in the chat for subscriptions that they havent seen, and chat about them just didnt know

Your post doesn’t quite make sense.

As a side note: USERNOTICE is public and channels owners don’t need to provide anything to you beyond their channel name and/or ID

I mean that there are often situations where the streamer is concentrated and it misses the moments when someone subscribes, anonymously or not, it doesnt matter. And the chat then also doesnt see that someone subscribed. Owners want on many channels to chat welcomed everyone, no matter the person clicked the send button or not.

I don’t quite understand the problem you are having. If a streamer misses a subscription there will still be the USERNOTICE event if the sub chooses to share it, so all overlays and alerts that are triggered by such subscriptions will still go off even if the streamer isn’t reading chat. To have alerts for even the people who may not want it announced that they just subscribed it is still possible to see new subs by polling the subscribers endpoint and looking for changes. From my view, I can only see it adding value to viewers as it gives them the option if it is to trigger an alert or not, much like resubbing, and twitchnotify has it’s own issues so I’m happy to see it gone. The only people that might have issues are those who have bots that track subs but the channel owner hasn’t given OAuth permissions to access the subscriptions endpoint, in which case those bots will now miss some subs but those people should never have expected gathering sub data in that way to be reliable or to always continue in that way.

Maybe I’m missing some other downside to twitchnotify being removed though, and feel free to correct me if there is as I’m curious why this is anything but a good thing?

Yes, my bot is exactly that, it collects statistics on the number of messages, subscriptions, subscription time for sabs and much more. In principle, I’m familiar with the hosts of the monitored channels and I wont have a problem getting the Client ID and OAuth token to get the list of subscribers so that I can track people who didnt click the send button. But it’s creepy not convenient, as for me. Also I would like to add, one more problem of the IRC at the moment for me isnt the possibility of creating rooms in the whisper through PRIVMSG using #jtv, which doesnt allow writing to the user if the user doesnt write the bot first. Otherwise, the IRC works perfectly.

I want to suggest, to add the opportunity to the owners of channels to include twitchnotify if they dont want anonymity for their subscribers

Well the PRIVMSG issue is something for another topic (and has already been brought up elsewhere), not this thread. If you know the broadcasters of the channels your bot monitors then getting permission to gain appropriate OAuth permissions would be your best course of action. Again, these changes don’t stop you doing what you are trying to do in any way, it just gives the end user the choice if they want their sub to be public (and included in data gathering bots such as yours) or private, in which case it’s up to the channel owner to decide if they want to give you access to subscriber data and if they choose not to then that is perfectly reasonable choice and you will just have to make do without being notified of every subscriber.

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The person who subbed DOESN’T WANT TO BE RECOGNISED

Currently, those people will tend to sub/resub whilst the channel is offline. Because they don’t want to be recognised.

Further more, a “big partnered caster” might choose to not notify their sub, because of the eventual “when are you streaming next” spam that might occur.

This makes it hell of a nasty to manage, Twitch side, since TWITCHNOTIFY has been on the way out for a while anyway, since the new resub stuff came in, that was all USERNOTICE anyway.

Thats just two examples of ways/reasons people want to sub anonymously. And a caster is better off honouring their lurkers right to lurk, than calling them out…

@Xambey We won’t be reintroducing twitchnotify. Users should have the right to privacy and choice with sharing their subscriptions. Similarly, broadcasters have the same right to share access to their subscriber list. We’d rather that sharing be an explicit choice rather than implicit.

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In addition to the privacy concerns others mentioned, let’s say the streamer uses the twitchnotify message to call new subs out, then he might still get the USERNOTICE for the same sub a minute later, so is he then supposed to call out the same sub a second time? You can’t just ignore the USERNOTICE either because it may have a custom message attached. It’s just impratical.

I’m glad that these systems are finally consolidated. The only thing Twitch needs to fix is that the Share-button shows up without having to reload the page, because a lot of people understandably don’t know about that and it’s a bit counter-intuitive.

@tduva SOON ™.

The use case that a user specifically does not want recognition for their sub has got to be less than 1% of the time. You’re solving a problem that really doesn’t exist.

This change punishes any new sub, as it makes them refresh their browser, losing viewing time, and causes more work to get even the hope of recognition.

This change also confuses the heck out of anyone new to twitch, or any casual user. Why would a new user think they have to reload their page, then hit announce, then go through ANOTHER process before they get any recognition of spending $ ?

This is the same point @tduva has made. @DallasNChains , please see that the announce button is integrated into the new sub process without a refresh before twitchnotify goes away.

It’s no more ‘punishing’ to new subs than the old system is where at times new subs missed seeing the alert for them pop up because it happened while the user just finished submitting their payment and hadn’t yet returned to the stream. Also it is not entirely uncommon for people to sub when a stream is offline so that it doesn’t cause an alert, or subbed at a bad point (ie, during pre-show lead up to a stream where alerts aren’t active, during a break, or interrupting a key part of gameplay), so even for those who DO want to show their sub can now do so at a more convenient time.

I agree that the current method isn’t very intuitive and I’ve even seen streamers have issues as it was never made clear to them either how subs would work and that a page refresh might be needed. People are catching on though and I’m seeing it become less of an issue in the channels I’m on as viewers and streamers now know how it works.

@Dist well, it does cause more work, so unless you love work, then yeah, that’s not great. It also makes it super confusing for any new to twitch users, and would have made at least 1/4 of new to twitch users miss out on it on our channels if we didn’t have twitchnotify hackaround working.

As for “not entirely uncommon”… I strongly disagree. we have less than 0.1% of people who sub offstream. That’s extremely uncommon. Even if you multiplied that by 100x to get 10% of all subs, that’s STILL uncommon. 1 in 10 is pretty definitively “uncommon”.

The number of people that would choose to go out of their way to lurk-sub is massively outweighed by the number of people for whom the current “sub then refresh then announce then do more stuff” system is confusing, and missing opportunities.

“People are catching on” will never apply to new users to twitch.

Why would a new user to twitch who comes over from _(insert platform), gets excited enough to subscribe, and then has nothing happen as a response ever stick around on twitch? The default response behaviour to “spend money” has to be “good job!” not “now go refresh and jump through some hoops”.

From the stats I’ve seen it is more common for someone to sub during an offline stream than for someone new to twitch to sub. From my stats, the vast majority of new subscribers have watched the streams for some length of time first, and out of the very small proportion of users that are new to these channels an even smaller number are new to Twitch as a whole (and even then they might not actually be new to twitch). These are just from my stats though, so of course your mileage may vary. It also shouldn’t be assumed that anyone new to Twitch would be expecting fanfare when they sub in the first place.

From my point of view, more choice for the user in this aspect is a good thing, especially as it allows more privacy if the user wishes and also more privacy for the partner if they want to minimise bots abilities to snoop and gather data on subs. Also you mention it being more work now but seem to forget that twitchnotify has it’s own problems, for example it gives you a display name, which is not entirely helpful when their display name might be Japanese characters which forces you to jump through the hope of searching for that display name to find their username and twitch ID before being able to record the sub.

When someone sees fanfare because of a subscription, and they’re new to twitch, so they decide to subscribe, and nothing happens – that’s bad.

The last time we did a main stream we had almost 20 new subs come over from facebook livestream before the stream even started on twitch because of the fanfare we were able to produce. When we pre-streamed on the 15th we reached 480,948 people on facebook - don’t tell me that people who are new to twitch are insignificant or don’t matter somehow :slight_smile:

WRT “Privacy” - that’s a non-issue. It affects an extremely tiny proportion of the twitch population, AND the option to lurksub already exists in all the ways that have been already mentioned.

Really? You’re complaining about Japanese characters? Compared to the number of hoops you’ll have to jump through to poll the API for new subs who don’t know they have to announce, that’s another non-issue for the vast majority of streamers (especially when IRC twitchnotify returns roman chacters).

The whole “having to refresh for share button to show up” issue has already been addressed: it’ll be fixed soon.

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