Whispers don't show when using a library to send them

API
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I know this topic has been around for ever. The problem is that I can’t find a real solution (If there is even any)

I have a bot (not known or verified, apparently that doesn’t make any difference from what I read) and using the tmi.js library I join my channel and also start a listener to wait for whispers (So yes, my bot wont whisper anyone if the viewer doesn’t whisper the bot to begin with)

I send the whisper and surprise surprise, there is no error or anything, but the person that sent the whisper don’t see the bot response until they close the whisper tab and open it again, in that case, “voilá” the whisper response is there.

Now digging even further, I notice that whispers with any regular user work prefectly, so I logged in a separate browser with my bot account and start sending me whispers to my main account, to my surprise, same problem, messages wont show not even on the same whisper tab I’m typing on (it’s like they freezed) but again, closing the tab and opening it again the messages are all there.

Then I was like, why this don’t work if whispers with other users work. Then I disconnected my bot that is connected with the tmi.js library and only left with him logged on a browser, I start whispering back and forward between my bot and main account, and what you think? Of course, everything works perfectly, whispers and responses show instantly.

So this is clearly some Twitch bug preventing users from seen responses from account connected via a different method than a browser I guess.

Now the question is… If registering a bot account as a “known” or “verfiied” bot doesn’t fix this, what does?

PS: Why do I need to whisper a viewer in the first place? Well, don’t forget they have to whisper the bot first to begin with. And the answer is easy, I’m making some minigames where viewers whisper the bot with their guesses and the bot needs to whispers them back to know if their guesses were valid or not.
So far nothing has worked to get whispers responses to work reliable.
Why do I want whispers? Well, simple enough, I don’t want bot spam in chat just to say: “xxxx your guess is valid” or whatever the case is.

Why Twitch limits the functionality of Whispers this way?

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Because a load of people misused the system to send spam and malicious links.

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Well not sure how that was misused to send spam, when the user is whispering my bot in the first place, I’m positive Twitch can detect if the bot account was first whispered, so after that, they should give us the full functionality of whispering back.

Specially when it’s not that they don’t do it, they just behave weird, as I said, the message is sent, it’s just not showing in real time on the viewers chat.

This mechanics makes everything even more frustrating. Either get rid of whispers for bots or don’t but doing this shaddy behavior makes it confusing for developers wondering what’s going on and wasting time trying to debug a know bug on Twitch end, and not developers or libraries doing something wrong.

Nowhere in the documentation it mentions that bot accounts can send whispers but viewers wont see them until closing and opening the whisper tab over and over. If that would be explained it would make things clear, but introducing this behavior doesn’t fix anything at all, as the viewer is still getting the message from a bot that “may” be using it to “spam”. So Twitch isn’t fixing it by blocking the whisper, is just intruding a bug to make it look like a “fix”

The KEY here is that the user first whispered the bot so… Why does Twitch limits my bot, it’s not that it’s whispering random accounts, but it’s answering to a received whisper.

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I’m over generalizing the whole system as a whole.

The whispers system is potentially this “bad” for “good developers” due to bad actors.

This is why the general advice is to use an extension instead and don’t rely on Whispers. Then you have better control over the User interaction and you don’t have to fight deliverability issues

Whispers as you have observed

tend to be buggy and are just not reliable for the use case you are describing.

You are right that if a user using the site initiates a whisper conversation with a bot then it should open a “conversation timed period” where anything should be able to reply to it. But it comes back to reliability, it’s not reliable, so an extension is a more optimal approach.

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Extensions is something I didn’t think of. Been that I’m against extensions in stream, I didn’t even consider it as an option. I guess it’s time I get over my boycott and try them, maybe it’s the solution for this type of iterations, not sure.
Thanks Barry for your time :wink:

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