Name Changes and What They Currently Mean.

[Dante557]

Bring out the party poppers and get a slice of cake because a long awaited feature of Twitch has finally landed.

NAME CHANGES

No longer do you need to be known as xx360NoScopezxx. You could change your name to a song lyric perhaps... YouSpinMeRightRoundBaby. You can change your name to your heart's content every 60 days! Great deal right?

Well, not currently at least in the realm of Twitch bots at least.

So what happened?

Twitch released a new version of their API a while ago which set the groundwork for this change to happen (Although it remains incomplete in certain aspects). Before this change whenever requests on the API were made your username was sent through gathering all the information that was needed. Naturally with this it was safe to assume that by saving the username as the key field in the database (As usernames are unique) that it was not really going to change that often. Before the announcement people had to make new accounts entirely and, in rare cases, get their name change via someone at Twitch. Easy enough to deal with.

The new version of the API changes this by requiring your userID instead. Although this was sent in previous versions of the API it was never really used anywhere. This is probably the major reason why many bot developers decided to save the Username and ignore the unique ID that was sent. Extra entries in a database may be minute for a few users by add that to a ton of entries and you've suddenly increased the database size quite substantially. This information is not easily sent via chat either, requiring a viewer to actually chat and come out of lurking to send the required information through IRC Tags.

We all know lurkers are the backbone of Twitch so you're not going to get the information right away. The depreciation of the previous versions of the API wasn't suddenly sprung upon developers (https://discuss.dev.twitch.tv/t/twitch-api-version-update-discussion-faq/8132) but the name change feature certainly was with Devs receiving no communication. I'd be pretty excited if I was the one to suddenly release a feature that has been in the making for years but in this sense it was poorly thought out.

I can give my own explaniation on it but I feel the developer of Ankhbot, Ankhheart, explains it a lot better. http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1spldj8

So how does this affect us

For Streamers: Your licence is stored via your username. If you change your username you will lose access to Deepbot. Of course we can do licence transfers to the new username you have chosen this is a manual process so it will take time. You can make a name change request here http://deepbot.deep.sg/forums/index.php?board=19.0

For Viewers: If you change your name you will lose your data. We have released a new alpha which allows the username to be edited by the streamer (This wasn't possible before) so it's highly recommended for streamer to download the latest version to prepare for this change.

We're sorry about any inconvenience this may cause. Cutting this topic short as I shortly have to go to work. Any information I miss should hopefully be edited in.
Dante557