I was wondering if there is any intention of adding a more permanent url to Twitch channels.
The idea comes from Twitter, where users can change their handle but not their id. As such urls like https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=783214 come hugely in handy, as it reduces the number of changes needing to be made should a handle name change occur.
Maybe something like twitch.tv/user?user_id= 12826 would redirect to twitch.tv/twitch
2 Likes
Since this is a site suggestion, I would file it at https://twitch.uservoice.com. Iām not going to be able to solve it, but I am curious about your use case. 
Since the API relies on ID and you already have it, you could get a user by ID to get their name for the URL.
I wasnāt 100% which was better, uservoice or somewhere here, API felt like the closest related section as it felt more devy to me.
The use case would be for websites that display lists of live users. While yes itās possible to do an update every time the user goes live it isnāt really efficient in my opinion, and even with a system of looking up the id and itās corresponding (potentially new) username once a day or every few hours, this will not tackle the issue if a particular user changes their username right before a new stream.
The user would be displayed as āonlineā because the check was done via the id, while the link towards the user would be invalid as it still points to the old username.
Itās something that happened to me personally. I do daily checks to see if the usernames are accurate and had somebody change their username before a stream, on the live page that displays all users currently live this caused an issue in terms of displaying the videos preview as well as linking to the user. I do understand I could change my system to handle this but itās one of my example use cases.
Another one would be on more static sites that donāt get too many updates or use embedded players.
In the case of a user changing their name just before they go live, why not change whatever you have checking their online status to also get their name and url at the same time? for example https://api.twitch.tv/kraken/streams/<channel ID> includes the channel object in itās response if a stream is live, which has the name and url fields that would be correct for the channel even after a name change.
For sure, I was hoping to highlight that with my āI do understand I could change my system to handle this but itās one of my example use casesā, but while I may be able to more or less easily change it other users systems may not be as susceptible to change.
I suppose I got lucky when I, just before submitting, thought of the embedded player causing issues.
Another use-case would be people linking in a more static manner; especially in places where the URL may be long-persisted and not easy to change. Many sites support permanent id-based URIs that redirect to friendly human-readable URIs. See also: https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html
This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.