Add created timestamp to /helix/users
A user's created timestamp is not yet available through Helix. The updated timestamp is personally less useful but would be nice for consideration.
Alca
shared this idea
As announced on Friday during our Developer Day, this endpoint has been updated to return created_at. You can see more info in our docs: https://dev.twitch.tv/docs/api/reference#get-users
10 comments
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AlexWayfer
commented
> "created_at" timestamps are now on the user object.
I confirm. But let's wait for it in the documentation, maybe it's accident.
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Alca
commented
"created_at" timestamps are now on the user object.
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im_crees
commented
Is there any news on this? This is important for moderation.
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kbyatnal
commented
It's been almost two years since Helix - is Twitch planning on adding this or not? It's clearly very necessary for developers to have.
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rhymu8354
commented
I asked about this on the forums over 6 months ago and got no response:
* https://discuss.dev.twitch.tv/t/created-at-in-helix-users-endpoint-when/22282I even cited two other posts which asked the same thing, including one which provided use cases:
* https://discuss.dev.twitch.tv/t/helix-vs-kraken-users-endpoint/12687
* https://discuss.dev.twitch.tv/t/user-created-at-in-new-api/15665I really wish the Twitch devs would respond in their own forum.
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RatWithAShotgun
commented
created_at is incredibly important for modding tools as bots, spam accounts or alt accounts are very often made in groups but may not be used immediately.
To give a concrete example, a streamer I mod for has recently been harassed and chat botted by someone with thousands of bots, after going into follow mode said person follow botted the channel with 26000 bots to be able to still spam in follow mode. Those bots were all between 1 to 3 months old at the time already, all created in large batches of a couple thousand each in about two hour spans each.
The only way to effectively identify those was by filtering by names, follow dates and `created_at` combined, to avoid hitting innocent random followers during the same times which would be unavoidable without `created_at.
We also regularly get people coming in and being dumb, getting banned and making new accounts right away that are seconds old and easily flagable this way.
A pure `created_today` flag for example would be almost useless to combat any of this.There are tons of examples of occurrences like that where having `created_at` is essential to keep chats protected, especially with twitch moderation response times usually being days or even weeks (only 6k of those 25k blatantly obvious bots are banned at this point for example despite multiple reports over the last 5 weeks).
Also note that the creation date is currently still available via official mod tools so in no way secret at all, anyone that wants it can get it already even if V5 was gone.
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XuluniX
commented
From https://discuss.dev.twitch.tv/t/ip-address-rate-limiting-for-v5-endpoints/24005/39
In my case, i had to deal with a total of about 40k bots on one channel.
For a good amount of them, the creation date of the accounts was in one of a few ranges.
However, the accounts were up to multiple weeks old before they followed and spammed a specific channel.
So yes, a "new-account" flag on the API doesn't help much, we need the date -
Tera_
commented
Like mentioned, this information is very important for moderation purposes. For example for determining which accounts are spam bots, since those usually have very similar creation timestamps.
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TETYYS
commented
This is important for moderation, please add this
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Rainami
commented
agreed I use it for many things and really need it in the Helix