I’m working on a chat bot and I am having problems with sending whispers.
Sounds familiar, right?
I’ve been through the developer documentation (the chat bot section) enough that I have portions memorized. From everything I’ve seen in the developer documentation, it does indeed state that sending whispers using a chat bot is a possibility. I’ve been through numerous community messages relating to this same type of issue, finding tips and hints that seem to change over time. The most recent trend I’ve noticed is that sending whispers is not reliable. While this may be true, this is not an acceptable answer when the API documentation clearly states that whispers can be sent.
So can someone, anyone (ideally an official response), please point me in the direction of something that is reliable? If there is not something reliable, then would someone that knows the official rule(s) (e.g. criteria for when a whisper is allowed to be sent and not flagged as spam) please make it clear?
Twitch does not disclose what methods of spam prevention they implement for obvious reasons.
While technically it is possible to send whispers, there’s no way to be certain if your account and the message you want to send will be caught by whatever anti-spam measures there are.
Because of this, as I’m sure you should be aware if you’ve read other posts is that Whispers is not designed for bot use and so things such as Extensions would fill the need of what most bots want to use whispers for.
If whispers is not designed for bot use, then wouldn’t it make more sense to make that clear in the API documentation? What is there currently is a simple mention of the spam classifer, information regarding how to send whispers (at least using commands), and a list of chat bot whisper maximums (by status of user, known, or verified). Nothing about that context implies that you are most likely not going to be able to send whispers; what that strongly implies is that you most likely will be able to.
Also, I wouldn’t necessarily expect Twitch to disclose everything about how spam whispers are determined; like I wouldn’t expect to see their list of regex expressions. However, I would expect things such as needing to have a user send a whisper before being able to send one back be listed. And I’m not even sure if this is true or not (I have seen it suggested in other posts), which is, of course, why I posted the original question.
Whispers work perfectly fine for some older apps, and ones that are considered ‘safe’ and not spam bots. Whispers are also an allowed usage of chat by 3rd party developers, so the technical documentation for their usage is correct. Even if Twitch did add something to the docs, it likely couldn’t be anything more than “Some whispers may be restricted due to anti-spam measures”, as they are not going to go into anything more specific than that, so it wouldn’t be the most helpful of warnings anyway, and wouldn’t give any developer any clue as it if they will be impacted or not.
Twitch continuously change and adjust their spam protection as needed, so what may impact a whisper being valid or not could be true one day, and not the next. There’s also likely a large range of metrics involved to determine a bots ‘score’ and if their whispers are classed as spam or not, so even if a user sending a whisper first to the bot impacts whispers it likely isn’t the only thing and so could be misleading to mention some measures but not mention specifics or list it all, causing more confusion.
Ok. I am a 3rd party party developer (unless there is more meaning behind the 3rd party developer term than I understand). I have a chat bot (which is a native application) that I am developing. It doesn’t use a specific Twitch account, so of course it requires the user to go through the OAuth process (with the account of their choosing) in order to give the chat bot the ability to do its job. The chat bot itself does not send any ‘uninvited’ whispers; it only responds with a whisper after a Twitch user has whispered the ‘chat bot’ first.
Since what I am developing does not use a specific twitch account, I cannot complete the ‘limit increase’ form (Limit Increase | Twitch Developers). As a developer, what option do I have in order to create a native application that can whisper through Twitch’s IRC?
There are no options for that. Your use case is not one that Whispers were designed for, so you should instead use other means of sending information to users such as Extensions.
Then I think the Twitch API documentation should be clear that native applications will not be able to use the whisper capability of Twitch IRC (I am assuming that is true). It does not currently state that. Do you disagree?
You can use whispers, and in some situations they may work, but at other times your usage may be detected as spam, for whatever reason, and not allowed through.