If a "Get User Followed Categories" endpoint existed, this would be possible to poll for. First query the categories, then query live streams within those categories. Notification would still be better, but this would be a fallback.

Also need a way to query followed categories/games in Helix.

Agreed - to clarify, the API needs to list all the games/categories that a user follows (not all the users who follow that category). Currently possible using Kraken, needs to be made available via Helix.

With the impending shutdown of Kraken, we need this. Please fix.

We need this. It's currently retrievable via Kraken but Kraken is being shut down soon.

If you don't want to be an affiliate or partner, get a channel bot to do your channel points instead.

Awesome! This is something that I created an extension to achieve, so it's definitely something that's needed. Thank you for creating this!

Will this be something that can be turned on/off per channel? There are some channels where I'd use it and some where I wouldn't.

The whole point of "/me" is to make a message read as if it's an action. That means that the person's name has to appear coherently with the rest of the text, instead of being separated. The absence of the colon is part of that, but is far from sufficient. Please reinstate the coloured text, as it helps to create a unified "action message" instead of the current system that makes /me into a useless way to make text look weird. This does NOT read correctly, and speaking as someone who's used actual IRC, does not even slightly live up to the expectations of this command.

Third-party software can do this. With the appropriate authentication, an app can be notified any time you ban someone, and can then share that (or you could choose to share that) with other streamers. Those streamers can then empower the app to ban those same users, under whatever definitions you choose.