It seems that early this morning Twitch decided to pull a rabbit out of their hat and surprise the community by changing how many connections can come from the same IP address for their Twitch IRC Chat. This is a welcomed change as it may put a serious dent into all the spambots and botnets that have been increasing over the last few months in Twitch channels.
Twitch Changed Their Stuff Again
Twitch has been making some interesting changes when it comes to their system as of late; the biggest one to note is potentially the twitch multichat system. They’ve added more ingest servers to balance out traffic a bit better and they’ve made every attempt to lower the amount of messages that get lost into the void. This new Twitch IRC Chat update happened around 3-4am on May 9th, 2014 and this can only mean good things (for the most part) for the Twitch community.
The Benefits and Consequences of this Twitch Update
While this may seem great if you are a streamer who is annoyed with spam bots littering channels since the end of last year, there are some legitimate downsides to restricting connections to the degree that has been noted today. This will allow for Twitch to provide a cleaner and better system to you, the viewer, and the streamers. During any major change, there are always a few kinks or problems that get discovered which is kind of what happened today.
The problem with this update is that there does not seem to be any exceptions to this new Twitch IRC Chat update: moderator bots such as Nightbot, Moobot, and even Xanbot are affected by this new change that has occurred which means that they may soon no longer be able to connect to anyone who requests it.
Nightbot made a statement on their dashboard, “Literally, I woke up to a slew of issues. Apparently Twitch decided at 3am last night to release a chat server change limiting both authorizations (essentially connections) per second and joins per second. These are limits based by IP address. […]”
As of this post, Nightbot has been forced to go into Donator-only mode. Moobot, while no notice given in the dashboard, has released a pinned tweet saying that it will only work in some random channels until Twitch fixes the situation or Moobot has time to work around this. ( Reference: https://twitter.com/TwitchTVMoobot/status/464755567341608960 ). Xanbot is currently down for maintenance according to their twitch channel (xangold)’s ixsanbotdeadagainbot.
What does this mean for you as a Streamer:
Currently, you can donate to Nightbot to regain functionality in your channel for the foreseeable future. The action taken by the Twitch team was primarily focused on getting rid of the spambots/botnets/fake-chatters/cheatsy-doodlers that have been increasingly infecting Twitch since the end of last year; while right now the moderator chatbots may be down, I am confident that Twitch will attempt to mitigate this and balance will be restored in the near future.
