Follow/unfollow channel API endpoints have been removed by Twitch on 2021-07-27 #813
Comments
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https://dev.twitch.tv/docs/change-log
Announcement thread here: Twitch has killed the follow users/channels endpoints on both public APIs, kraken and helix, because of abusive/harrassing "follow-bots". There is no way for legitimate 3rd party applications to fix or work around that other than trying to use the private GQL API from their website, similar to what abusive bot developers will now have to do, or making the user visit Twitch's website to follow/unfollow channels manually in their web browser. Unfortunately, I have not heard of this removal until just now, otherwise I would've reacted to this sooner. I've commented on the announcement thread, and as you can see on there, someone already opened a suggestion thread on Twitch's feedback tracker which suggests an implementation of developer approvals and restoring the removed API endpoints for approved developers. As an end-user of Streamlink Twitch GUI, voting on this suggestion thread is probably all you can do for now to help with this situation.In the mean time, I will have to think what I can do until this has been resolved by Twitch. I am not sure if it will though, because it is Twitch after all. This is really sad. |
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thanks, im glad it wasnt just me. also since it doesnt seem likely to get re-implemented good luck guys! |
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I haven't made a decision yet whether I want to remove it completely (and the sub button along with it), or whether I should let the user decide if they want to open the channel's page on Twitch.tv in their web browser. The web browser workaround is pretty ugly from a usability standpoint, but for now this is the only solution to at least be able to follow or unfollow channels. There also hasn't been a response yet from Twitch regarding the approved developer suggestion, so waiting for a bit first won't hurt, as the missing API endpoints don't break anything in the Twitch GUI and it handles it correctly with its response failure logic. It's just annoying, but that won't change if the follow buttons get removed or replaced with a "workaround". This whole debacle also made me wonder whether I should re-implement the features which got removed in the past due to the switch to their GQL API on their website, like channel panels for example. I've been avoiding this in Streamlink Twitch GUI because it's not a public API and didn't want to abuse their services (in Streamlink there simply is no other way to get the data), but I'm at a point now where I don't really care anymore, just like they don't care about their 3rd party devs. |
bastimeyer
changed the title
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for sure i can understand developers frustrations, and users. also i see twitch's point about the api being removed....they want to remove bots ability... great meanwhile 40 minutes ago i watched a bot trigger 120 spams of streamlabs saying "thanks for the follow" so...yeah twitch /follow api might be removed, but certaintly didnt stop the follow bots! wow actually happened again 5 minutes ago, this time i verified the user's +120 followers and how about finding a way to stop bots from being created to begin with? irreguardless..... if you can use the GQL api, if its even possible... might be great to move forward and yes i wholly agree, the reason we use some 3rd party tools is because with want options, lightweight, feature rich, open source & crossplatform alternatives |
See #813 Twitch has decided to completely remove the endpoints for following and unfollowing channels on both their kraken and helix public APIs. Their reason for this is that there are follow-bots which are abusing the public APIs by mass-following channels or bots which have been created for harassing streamers who use follow alerts in their streams. Instead of implementing ways to prevent abuse of these endpoints, like for example rate-limiting create/delete requests, either for entire client-IDs (registered applications) or individual OAuth tokens (user logins in a registered application), and/or limiting follow and unfollow requests in quick succession, either by caching requests or by adding a time threshold based on the follow date, Twitch simply went the easy route and killed the entire system which regular 3rd party developers rely on. They are thus showing all these developers their middle finger. This is not a surprise, as Twitch has been actively neglecting their public APIs ever since they switched to the GraphQL-based one on their website. Past actions regarding the public APIs have shown this as well. For Streamlink Twitch GUI this unfortunately means that the buttons for following and unfollowing channels have to be removed, as there's no way of working around this API endpoint removal. Abusive follow-bots will however still be able to use the GraphQL API and work around the removal this way, but applications like this which operate entirely on the public APIs and where user logins are tied to the application's client-ID (which is limited to the public APIs) will not be able to switch to the private GraphQL API for re-implementing the follow buttons. The only possible way would be asking the user to copy their secret OAuth token from the dev-tools of their web browser after logging in on Twitch.tv, or writing an extension for every popular web browser out there which would do this on its own and asking the user to install it. The OAuth token from the GraphQL API could then be used as a secondary way to authenticate the user, so that they could follow channels again by using GraphQL API endpoints instead. Even following games would be possible again, because these endpoints were never added to kraken or helix and in the past only lived on Twitch's old private REST API (similar to kraken) which has been shut down years ago. All of this is however off the table, as it's way too inconvenient for the user and is also too much work to write and maintain. Not to mention that it would abuse Twitch's private API, which should be avoided. As a way to make the user still be able to follow and unfollow channels when using Streamlink Twitch GUI, a new button has been implemented which simply opens the channel page on Twitch.tv in the user's browser, like the subscribe button already did. Since it doesn't make much sense having two buttons which do the same thing, this commit therefore also removes the subscribe button. Both the follow and subscribe buttons have shared a mixin with logic for checking the followed/subsciption status of the user, so this has been removed as well. In case that the Twitch developers see that their idea of killing the API endpoints was a bad idea and didn't work out as expected (as abusive bots are still doing their thing), this change can simply be reverted, but this probably won't happen any time soon, or at all. There are suggestions on Twitch's feedback tracker to grant "approved" applications (client-IDs) or 3rd party developers (accounts with registered applications) access back to these API endpoints, but it is unclear whether Twitch will implement such an approval system or whether they choose a cheap workaround instead which doesn't fit into applications like Streamlink Twitch GUI and the like.
See #813 Twitch has decided to completely remove the endpoints for following and unfollowing channels on both their kraken and helix public APIs. Their reason for this is that there are follow-bots which are abusing the public APIs by mass-following channels or bots which have been created for harassing streamers who use follow alerts in their streams. Instead of implementing ways to prevent abuse of these endpoints, like for example rate-limiting create/delete requests, either for entire client-IDs (registered applications) or individual OAuth tokens (user logins in a registered application), and/or limiting follow and unfollow requests in quick succession, either by caching requests or by adding a time threshold based on the follow date, Twitch simply went the easy route and killed the entire system which regular 3rd party developers rely on. They are thus showing all these developers their middle finger. This is not a surprise, as Twitch has been actively neglecting their public APIs ever since they switched to the GraphQL-based one on their website. Past actions regarding the public APIs have shown this as well. For Streamlink Twitch GUI this unfortunately means that the buttons for following and unfollowing channels have to be removed, as there's no way of working around this API endpoint removal. Abusive follow-bots will however still be able to use the GraphQL API and work around the removal this way, but applications like this which operate entirely on the public APIs and where user logins are tied to the application's client-ID (which is limited to the public APIs) will not be able to switch to the private GraphQL API for re-implementing the follow buttons. The only possible way would be asking the user to copy their secret OAuth token from the dev-tools of their web browser after logging in on Twitch.tv, or writing an extension for every popular web browser out there which would do this on its own and asking the user to install it. The OAuth token from the GraphQL API could then be used as a secondary way to authenticate the user, so that they could follow channels again by using GraphQL API endpoints instead. Even following games would be possible again, because these endpoints were never added to kraken or helix and in the past only lived on Twitch's old private REST API (similar to kraken) which has been shut down years ago. All of this is however off the table, as it's way too inconvenient for the user and is also too much work to write and maintain. Not to mention that it would abuse Twitch's private API, which should be avoided. As a way to make the user still be able to follow and unfollow channels when using Streamlink Twitch GUI, a new button has been implemented which simply opens the channel page on Twitch.tv in the user's browser, like the subscribe button already did. Since it doesn't make much sense having two buttons which do the same thing, this commit therefore also removes the subscribe button. Both the follow and subscribe buttons have shared a mixin with logic for checking the followed/subsciption status of the user, so this has been removed as well. In case that the Twitch developers see that their idea of killing the API endpoints was a bad idea and didn't work out as expected (as abusive bots are still doing their thing), this change can simply be reverted, but this probably won't happen any time soon, or at all. There are suggestions on Twitch's feedback tracker to grant "approved" applications (client-IDs) or 3rd party developers (accounts with registered applications) access back to these API endpoints, but it is unclear whether Twitch will implement such an approval system or whether they choose a cheap workaround instead which doesn't fit into applications like Streamlink Twitch GUI and the like.
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402cab1 has been merged into There will be a new release within the next couple of days. I'm not yet sure whether I want to add a message to the app that clarifies the situation, because most people won't read the changelog, but I also don't want to be too annoying with it. I'll leave this issue open and pinned for a while, so that there won't be any duplicates.
Not possible for auth related stuff like following channels or games. I only mentioned it because of channel panels, which were removed in the past when Twitch shut down their old private API where this data could be retrieved from.
I am aware of this. Switching to helix will be a lot of work and that needs to be done as the next step after the next release. I've already started working on that a few months ago, but only a bit. |
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That is very annoying. i was using follow & unfollow both via your app and chatty a lot. I mean I don't even remember when was the last time I followed or unfollowed someone from web. Years ago probably. Very inconvenient. Shame on Twitch.. |
@bastimeyer Maybe using some of these could enable you to create easily maintainable node.js modules (e.g. Twitch Clients) using Rust: Just as an idea. Thanks for the great work! |
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These libs are completely irrelevant. Twitch has removed the API endpoints for following channels. Simple as that. There is no way to follow a channel via kraken (shutdown at the end of February) AND helix (see #849 and #852). The only "workaround" would be implementing their GraphQL API that's used on their website, but this isn't possible without major drawbacks, because users would need to get their personal OAuth token from their web browser's dev tools after logging in on the Twitch.tv website (or a web browser extension would need to be written). I've already commented on all of this plenty of times. It's not possible and all users can do is ask Twitch to bring the API endpoints back. There's a feature request linked above, but I'll link it here again: Locking, as there's nothing to be discussed here and I don't want to have this thread growing unnecessarily, because it'll bury the relevant informations. |
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Closing the thread, as there's nothing that can be done apart from voting, and even then it's very unlikely that Twitch will re-introduce this. As I mentioned in #856, it's possible that a follow channels+games feature could be implemented locally in the future without relying on Twitch accounts. Logins would however still be necessary, because it's a requirement of the Twitch helix API. |
Checklist
Streamlink Twitch GUI version
v1.9.1
Streamlink version
v1.7.0
Operating system, environment and configuration details
Ubuntu 18.04
Description
according to Chatty
/follow reports:
Note: Twitch planned to remove follow/unfollow functionality from their API on July 27, 2021.i know im using an old streamlink & streamlink-twitch-gui
but now it seems clicking Follow in streamlink-twitch-gui does not work
i did a quick issues search for "follow" to see if any bugs were reported about this
i dont see anything recent in commits about "follow"
if nothing else, to bring it to attention
otherwise disreguard, and my apology for using an old version...
thanks!
Debug log
No response
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