Unnotified disconnects

[tombh]

I've had a couple of moments where twt stops receiving messages. I don't know how much this has to do with twt itself or Twitch or even my machine. So just thought I'd mention it in case anybody else has similar issues. Also, in this state, twt can't send messages either. Though note that the web chat still works fine in every way. And all I need to do to fix twt is restart twt.

Understanding the underlying issue would obviously be ideal. But perhaps more usefully I wonder if such a state could be detected?

[Xithrius]

Unfortunately Twitch's IRC servers aren't exactly stable, with random problems coming and going ever since I started this project. The most recent one was users not being able to connect to chats, and only after a couple retries would the connection finally go through. At one point the issue magically stopped happening. There's no response from the IRC servers when a connection issue like this happens, and even though there are safeguards in place to make sure that you can reconnect, it doesn't solve all disconnections. There's the possibility that something's been missed though, so I'll dig around once I get the chance. Thanks!

[tombh]

That doesn't surprise me at all. I think Twitch Chat is kind of infamous for being unreliable 😞 Thanks for offering to dig around.

I was thinking of some ugly hacks. Like for example, a background thread could connect to a random high viewer channel that has a constant stream of messages, and could use that as a kind of heartbeat to detect disconnects. But I don't even know if the disconnects work like that, as in across channels, perhaps they're just per-channel. And besides it's an ugly hack.

[tombh]

I've just seen that there is REST API access to Twitch chat, I didn't think there was. Is it new? Or does it just have notable disadvantages over IRC? Like is it harder to implement?

[Xithrius]

I don't think it's new. Probably not meant for chat though, that's either IRC or websockets. Websockets might be the upgrade, but I haven't had time to look into it.

[tombh]

Right, websockets seem to be the upgrade:

With the introduction of Chat on EventSub, it is recommended to upgrade your chatbots that are using Twitch IRC to use EventSub (for reading chat messages and roomstates) and Twitch API (for sending chat messages).

Although a chat client isn't quite the same as a chatbot perhaps?

Anyway, I was wondering if that might be a little PR I could think about? I mean just using a websocket to detect if the IRC connection had fallen behind?

[Xithrius]

tbh it's probably about time I migrated the entirety of this project to websockets. I'll look into the docs and see what the stability is like, might take a little bit to get done though.

[tombh]

Haha, yes, that would be another way to do it. No rush ✨

[Xithrius]

Upgrade to websockets will be done in #677. If you run into any issues after the merge (once it happens), feel free to open a new issue on it. Thanks!

[tombh]

Awesome!!!!