I found a glitch with Twitch. I found that if you get banned from chat, you can still private message everyone. Is this supposed to happen? We might need to patch that in case it annoys people.
Whispers are supposed to work like that (at least for now?)
If you’re banned in one channel you still can private message everyone in that channel unless they put you on ignore
Whispers do not have a channel context.
IE Whispers are the same as Private messages in that regard
This is not a bug; whisper functionality would break if everyone in TO/banned channels got automatically blocked. Whispers aren’t meant to be channel-specific, they can be used to freely communicate with people in any other channel.
Not to mention, what would be the rules for such a system? Would it block only people currently in that channel? All future people who join that channel as well? What about when a person leaves that channel? The overhead from processing joins/parts alone is already too large to handle in some cases, and that barely even involves any processing. What if you have a friend you regularly talk to through whispers, and they happen to be watching the same channel when you get TO/banned?
It sounds like such a rare and specific occurrence (one person, who could message at most a few people, and who has the desire to even do so), that if it ever became a problem, one could simply put the annoying individual on ignore.
In my experience, it’s actually been beneficial for the whisper system to be of a separate scope. When an individual gets timed out or banned (either by a bot or a human moderator), not everyone in the channel always agrees with the decision, and there’s often still people in the channel who would like to correspond with them, and vice versa. Additionally, it’s been an extraordinary communication tool between the banned individual and the mods of the chat, especially in cases where a bot made a bad decision, or a human moderator misclicked and TO/banned the wrong person, and for TO/ban appeals as well.
Before the whisper system was introduced, most of these things had to be done through the PM (private message) system, which was clunky, slow, cluttered by unimportant and irrelevant messages, and often ignored entirely. Just one example, but one especially relevant to your post: ban appeals were usually very cumbersome to do through PM, because a banned individual would need to find and message one or even a few moderators, wait a day or more to hopefully hear a response, and then the moderator would either have to look through logs or guess on whether or not to unban, which most of the time resulted in just guessing. With unbound whispers, the communication can all happen immediately, and with all the relevant information still at hand; making for a much better experience for the mod and the viewer alike.
All of these things would be broken or seriously impaired by such a change to the whisper system, so hopefully the examples I’ve provided demonstrate why it exists how it is.
This seems like just a misunderstanding, or a case of vocal minority, but still one worth arguing for; because the whisper system has been a godsend, and a long awaited feature for many many people. The benefits and uses of the currently-standing whisper system reach much further than the topic of this thread, and I think we’ve only just seen the beginning of many great uses to come.
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