Continuing to post for documentation. It is now March 2023. Years of an issue being known, documented, and reported with seemingly no plans for a fix , regardless of the 'planned' marker added 4 years ago.

The confirmed bot list is ever-growing. More and more malicious links are being spread via spam bots and lurk bots. Lurk bots have solid documentation of being in tens of thousands of channels at once. Verification requirement settings have helped stop some, but not all follow bottings and hate raids.

This issue has pushed creators and viewers off the platform altogether and continues to affect Twitch users every day. Where's the action?

This is still an issue in December 2022. Please address it.

Just an updated reminder, Twitch just gotten an influx of 4 million+ accounts within 24hrs as of September 25th 2022, (yesterday of this post), and most likely are all bots for possible hate raids, or follow botting. I already went through an banned 209k+ known bot accounts that have been on twitch for the past 5 years alone (still active accounts as far as I know of), and that takes me 6 days to run on each channel I moderate for, ain't no one got time to go through 4 million accounts to figure out what needs banning or blocking. Twitch has never cared, they only care about money, Never been about creators or their safety or the viewers safety (if these bots are also around monitoring people's activities to gather info about them). Justin.tv was a great site in its day and had a lot of potential, and Twitch (specifically Amazon) has completely blown it.

Upvoted because this is still an ongoing issue, and even the original poster has updated that a lot of the things they mentioned still have yet to be addressed.

So I'm the one that posted this back in May 2017... want an update on how well Twitch cares? I put together a list of all bot names from Oct 2021 to June 2022, after removing invalid names and safe bots (like Nightbot, etc, or at least all the safe bots I know) I barely managed to bring that list down To this day, there are still these bots active and I haven't started July's list yet. want to know the number? 190,058 bots are STILL active accounts on twitch... These are just the bots! They don't contribute to views, they tend to be malicious in hate raids, or they are collecting people's info. They have been linked to targeted attacks by investigating easy targets to follow and spread, these are bots that in anywhere from 50+ channels (no normal person is going to sit in 50+ channels for no reason, if they can't even contribute to Twitch's views to support streamers), all the way up to almost 76k channels at a time.

This request wasn't just about bots too! It was to also ban unwanted viewers (stalkers, harassers, people with mal-intentions, twitch streamers have been known to be stalked and threatened, especially those in minority groups, females, and other cases, twitch doesn't do ****, the police don't do ****, how would you feel if you been swatted because someone you banned was still getting info on who you were and where you are by lingering in the channel, a ban should also be a block, and it should also remove their ability of even finding that channel for protecting creators and other viewers!) I've been in moderating positions for over 15 years in different platforms and games and communities. This is absolutely atrocious and just Greed talking from Twitch's end, they don't care, if they cared, something would have been done years ago, I've been around since the justin.tv years back in 2010. The pure frustration with talking to anyone on twitch staff is real, because they just don't care.

There are like 320 bots who are following my channel and have the same profile picture but different names, is there a way to quickly remove them from my channel? If there isn´t please make a way to.

Posted May 2017, response April 2019, still an issue in March 2022.

@HelixxVR, that's the problem! You ban them, but they are still there. I would expect, if I ban somebody, he should be not able to connect to the chat, and would be not able to watch my stream. That's it. I ban a harassing person, but he is still reading my chat and watching the stream. Creates a new account or use an old one, and harassing me again...or send a 10 bit cheer to harass me...and so on....ok. Those bots are do such things probably not.

And as in the original idea is written, such bots like electricallongboard should be banned from Twitch, forever. I voted at least for this.

I use a bot checker that one of my stream team made. it works by checking all the users in your chat and telling you how many are bot accounts so you can easily ban them from the channel.

"It is not possible to retrieve compromising or sensitive information by lurking in chat."

Ummm, you can literally log all messages with a basic script. Aka data mining. Aka, hoping someone slips up and reveals a bit too much information.

I find it fascinating how you honestly think these bots can never be used maliciously, when only a few seconds of critical thinking debunks that idea.

The fact is, Twitch needs to strengthen their bot rules so I don't have to go to a third party website and check if the lurker in my chat is a bot I need to ban.

Also just wanted to add that the hossbots are run by a known bad actor who has been violating TOS and I do not support this misuse of the platform/bot tools.

You can just ban accounts that lurk; twitch uses IRC (internet relay chat) and some info, like whether you are live, etc. is available to anyone who looks for it. Twitch’s API allows this so that extensions can function, and bots can’t access any information that is private. It is not possible to retrieve compromising or sensitive information by lurking in chat. If lurkers are spamming chat with unwanted messages, that means they aren’t lurking, and THAT is a twitch TOS violation. But please be aware that millions of people/users have access to the same info that those lurkbots do. It’s public information. Most lurkbots don’t care about that unless they are aggregating data about how many accounts are playing what games (twitch insights.net) or just lurk to passively get people to check out their channels. The /ban @username command isn’t “their” command. It’s a universal command that all streamers can use to ban users they don’t want to be in chat. Lurkbots aren’t “following” on raids, they can’t through IRC api calls. They are SIMULTANEOUSLY in many chats at once.

I’m currently lurking to promote a promotional channel for marginalized streamers. Bots are people too.

Live and let live.

I was happy tosee this suggestion.. untill seeing it was from 2017. Well.. I made the same general suggestion to Twitch today over Twitter.. For 1 banning the bots and hate raiders should keep them off of the channel all together.

Ideally remove it from being seen at all.. but short of that at LEAST keep them from refollowing and retriggering follow notifications with that.

@Zaytri
> This idea was submitted in 2017, Twitch finally addressed it in 2019, how has Twitch not fixed this issue yet?

Because Twitch won the streaming wars. Mixer is gone and Google doesn't know how to make their system good. Twitch literally doesn't care now.

I'm having problems with "viewer bots" yesterday when i was streaming the new Halo infinite beta. where can i go and do to report this? I tried clicking on the report button to report them for having a bot account but you don't have a option to report something like this. .Bot named hoss00312_manage followed me then about every minute I got hoss00312_digestion, hoss00312_trouble, hoss00312_receptive, hoss00312_riddle and then three hours latter hoss00312_soak.

Yea what Zaytri said - if this has been an issue for THREE TO SIX YEARS now - why is it only NOW being addressed? I was just hateraid/botted - people are like "Why because you're not popular" - they don't care anymore, I had to sit for a half hour with my mods yesterday in the middle of my first 13 hour stream - setting subscriber only mode for a HALF HOUR OR MORE and we set follower only for a 10 minute per user and forgot to turn it off - I have 100+ pages from nightbot since i modded nightbot of the scam/hatred. Sure, the hatred didn't phase me - they managed to utterly miss what my trans pronouns were and in turn trying to insult me managed to ACCIDENTALLY validate me. I had two or more people in chat say they had to duck out for a half hour or more because the ordeal gave them an extreme panic attack. Permaban not just ON the site but prevent this stuff from happening. To think that you're only JUST NOW going "Ok ok ok i'll do better" makes me think you're no better than your parent company. Thank god for places like Commander Root's twitch bot removal tool, because without that i'd have to MANUALLY remove 4-600 bots. The original count didn't filter through because we were battling 100+ during the actual stream and waited for it to finish. LambrightWayne is one of those possibly connected - but nobody's paying attention and because it's not connected to "TWITTER" we can't get twitter involved (despite the fact the bots came after tons of us with different tags over this week). I realize that you guys said somethign this week after several articles, but it took THIS LONG? With the advent of the new tags you left 1000s of streamers vulnerable. Please PLEASE get this under control NOW.

This idea was submitted in 2017, Twitch finally addressed it in 2019, how has Twitch not fixed this issue yet?

Seriously Twitch. Implement a Permaban model that prevents bots from connecting at all and consequently being listed in the Users list. If you want to incorporate some sneaky monitoring of chatter, do it on your server side without clogging our user list. With the number of bots out there, you're reasoning for allowing this has obviously been abused.

https://twitchinsights.net/bots is a very helpful link to confirm your findings, the fact that commanderroot is number one and partnered on twitch says a ton about how little twitch cares.

Just found a ton more for you guys. it's about that time of year that bots gather for a future attack.

the follow accounts seem to all be from the same bot or associated to the same bot: doubleslappy, rubberslayer, lemonjuices12, repined, nighest, wringers, letups, discoursed, sultriest, tonnages, belabors, forcepss, concocts, junketing, surplused. Many of these accounts seem to all be created the same day, link to each other, and proclaim to be streamer for fortnite with NO history of ever streaming.

from Discoursed on down the list, all have nearly 1k followers after just creating their accounts on the same day within the last month and using the link can confirm are live in 4k+ channels right now... That's a huge red flag, I hope that helps. I've already went through and reported/banned them, but twitch doesn't actually do anything, so just ban them.

I went from 235 followers to 3.9k help me please :/