As it currently stands, Twitch Partners are not allowed to request Partner Support to change their alias to anything below 4 characters. I know that I along with multiple other Twitch Partners have ran into this issue when contacting Twitch support to try and remove extra numbers or special characters from our names. It has also been equally as frustrating for me and these other Twitch Partners when these name changes are continuing to be offered to the biggest Partners on the platform, but smaller or mid sized Partners are still rejected when they ask.

My suggestion is to allow Twitch Partner Support to help Twitch Partners in these situations so that they can change their alias's to have a minimum of 3 characters instead of the current 4+ requirement policy.

With the ongoing outbreaks of follow and hate bots "raids", the creation of multiple accounts is simply too easy to abuse on the platform. Creating an account on Twitch does not require an authentic email address before using its services: watching content, following a streamer, sending messages in streamers chats, modifying the account details, etc.

Many streamers are being harrassed by bots and "IP Grabbers" by:
- Mass following streamers with inappropriate names and account details;
- Mass spamming chats with obscene languages and characters (ex: racism, homophobia, transphobia, nazi, etc..);
- Having extensions on their user profile which allows them to grab the IP Address of Twitch users, and broadcasting them.

At the moment, when creating an account, you do not need an authentic email address and you are not required to verify the account since there is a function to verify at a later time with "Remind me later" (Example of account creation: https://youtu.be/1waYtIUHkz4)

My proposition is the following:
Before using any of Twitch services, the account must be verified by email, and there should not be any way to by-pass this verification process. To sign-up to Twitch, the user should be inserting their email address, in which a one-time registration link could be sent out to.

Doing this will slow down the creation of fake accounts used to mass follow & mass hate streamers.

First of all, good job on implementing non-Authy, non-SMS 2FA!

That being said, there's still a major hole in your 2FA implementation, and that's requiring a user to set up SMS authentication before they can set up other forms of 2FA. Unless I've missed something huge, whenever I try to set up 2FA on Twitch, I get directed to put in my phone number first. There's no prompt I can use to skip this step.

This is completely counter to how a lot of other sites do 2FA, where SMS authentication is an option, not a requirement. You can completely ignore SMS authentication and just use a standard TOTP code to set up Google Authenticator, etc. I would like to see Twitch adopt this practice as well: instead of requiring us to put in our phone number first, please just give us a list of 2FA options and let us pick a method without requiring the others. Or at least give us the option to set up SMS, set up an alternate 2FA method, and then remove SMS afterwards.

Not requiring SMS is important for several reasons:

• It's one of the most insecure forms of 2FA. Relatively speaking, it's significantly easier to intercept a SMS or gain control of someone's number than it is to crack a TOTP token. (See this article for examples: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/08/password-breach-teaches-reddit-that-yes-phone-based-2fa-is-that-bad/) Requiring SMS means that everyone's account now has that "weakest link," even if they use a TOTP app.

• Not everyone is comfortable giving their phone number to Twitch. Phone numbers are used for all sorts of things these days, including sensitive accounts. Some people just might maintain a strict online/offline life separation, and are wary of their phone number being leaked. Even if Twitch never intentionally reveals SMS authentication numbers to the public, hacks can and do happen.

• Not everyone has a phone, or has a phone capable of receiving text messages, or a permanent phone number, or a phone that's recognized by Twitch as legitimate... Some people are still on landline for financial reasons. Some people are using small, alternative carriers like Republic Wireless or Google Fi, which get flagged as VoIPs. (Which Twitch does not allow for SMS authentication, despite those numbers being able to receive text messages.) The possibilities go on and on.

I'm sure there are many other reasons why requiring SMS authentication is a bad idea. I'm not asking for it to be removed entirely, but we should at least have the option of NOT using it.

Thanks for reading, and do correct me if this option already exists and I somehow missed it.

(See also: https://twitch.uservoice.com/forums/310228-account-management-e-g-login-connections-pass/suggestions/35025769-an-option-to-disable-sms-authentication-fallback-a)

I'd like to comment on something that I think it would be nice to have when changing your username, and what happens is that when you change your name the count on the number of subs you have gifted is reset and it's split in two different usernames (your old one and the new one). And, for instance, in the board of leadership of stream elements which is shown in some channels doesn't appear the total of subs concerning your account, and it's split in two as I said before. So, I think you could do something about that because that concerns as well the emotes you receive when gifting subs and things like that.

Some people may have old accounts that they had forgotten about. In my case. I have one without the numbers at the end of the name. I recently was able to log into it and would like to have the ability to swap the name with my current account.

If someone can prove they own both of the accounts, it would be nice for some way to swap them. If I change the name of the account with no numbers, there's no guarantee I'll be able to be the one to snag it whenever it gets freed up and that could be 6+ months.

The suggestion: Add in the ability to swap names between accounts and could be some option on both ends to "approve" the swap before it goes through

I have found a username that appears to be available but is blocked within your system due to an error.

The error shown is: "This user name may be offensive and is not allowed."

I have attempted to report this several times since October and have been met with the same policies regarding recycling and name changes when it does not apply to this situation.

If there is one name that is incorrectly being caught in your filter I'd assume other users may have this problem as well. If a username IS available and IS appropriate for use then I believe there should be a way to say so.

Currently, users can change their names once every 60 days and old user names are recycled after at least 6 months. In my experience, it is not uncommon for users to want to switch back to an old name but they have to wait 6+ months to do it. I suggest allowing a user to change their name back at any time within that 6 month period (like https://twitch.uservoice.com/forums/310228-account-management-e-g-login-connections-pass/suggestions/42914982-revert-username-change), bypassing the 60 day rename cooldown (but the cooldown would apply after renaming back).

I suggest limiting the 6 month grace period to names with some level of activity (i.e., while using that name). Specifically, the kind of "activity" I would consider are things where someone else taking the old name could confuse others, like adding friends or getting new followers. If this activity level has not been met, recycle the name after the 60 day cooldown (during which the user would still be able to revert the change).

In the same way, I have a number of suggestions to help with confusion after a user has changed names.

"Your channel URL will not redirect to your new name. You will need to update the URL anywhere you are using it." The old URL should redirect during the 6 month period (or for much longer, but maybe not forever, for partners). API requests for /helix/users?login=oldname should return successful responses with the login field as newname and perhaps an additional field indicating the matched oldname (so requests with multiple login parameters specified are not confused).

I suggest also showing in a users follows and friends lists the name that was used when the follow/friend was added, for at least the 6 month period.

Note:
Some people might say that some of these changes could help people intent on harassing others, but these suggestions are entirely about making name changes a more seamless transition in most cases. Renaming an account does not change its unique user identifier, friends, follows/followers, subscriptions/subscribers, some or all of which can potentially be used by harassers. The best option at this time in cases of harassment is to delete the account, after reporting everything to Twitch and law enforcement, if appropriate.

re: https://blog.twitch.tv/en/2021/09/29/securing-your-chat-with-phone-and-email-verification/

The FAQ suggests alternatives to mobile verification, VOIP, et al., are not good enough for verification; i.e., too cheap to spoof.

I'm an affiliate in long standing, can that fact not be verification that I can be trusted not to make duplicate accounts? Twitch has my tax ID, I'm pretty sure that they're pretty sure who I am. I do use Authy (and other online services) for verification, but I do not use cell networks ("mobile").

It makes little sense that Twitch has approved Us affiliates to represent their Terms of Service well enough to pay us, yet I'm not trusted enough to speak in Phone Verified Chat channels.

I use Google Voice for all my mobile needs. I give it out to every service that asks for my mobile number, and then, if they give it out to spammers, I can easily filter them out.

But I can't use my GV number for Twitch - it reports "only mobile phone numbers may be used".

I do not give out the number that goes to my SIM card. It's not necessarily going to be the same number if I switch providers, and literally every text and call I get through it and not GV is spam, because I never give it out.

Since people are starting to use "verified accounts only" on their chats, this has suddenly gone from "that's annoying" to "this is preventing me from participating in communities". And I don't think the streamers are wrong for using the filter, because I've watched what happens if they don't, so I'm not going to try and convince them to change it.

Perhaps GV allows you to get new numbers too easily, and all the other services I've used it with such as [checks notes] Amazon Web Services are inundated with people using fake GV numbers.

But I don't think that's the case, presently.

My account was "automatically flagged and temporarily blocked to prevent abuse" and now I am unable to chat.

I had not interacted with the channel except to click the follow button prior to this block being applied. To be clear - there were absolutely no messages sent by me to this channel prior to this block happening. I have since sent an unban request, and am still waiting for a response.

My account now displays "Banned on Linked Account" and searching tells me that 'If a user is seeing this message, they have had another account with their phone/email banned from your chat previously;'

I have never had another account using my current email or phone number. I'm a completely new user to your platform. I used your locate feature and have confirmed that only one account is connected to my email, and I only added my phone number to my account today after this block was applied.

Your anti-harassment ML based system appears to be giving false positives, and needs some work

Platform: Twitch Android App version 12.4.1