What should you do if other streamers accuse you of viewbotting?
I recently had a extreme case of another streamer accusing me of viewbotting during a stream session for "World of Warships".
Here is the chat log from the accuser, click on image to bring up full size.
As you can see this broadcaster went on a pretty long rant. I didn't ban this fellow right off the bat because I wanted to see how far he would go in his tirade. If you don't have thick skin just ban people right off the bat. But if these things don't bother you, do not ban them and let them carry on with their tirade. Make sure to screenshot the chat log and hold it in your records in case they go overboard with non stop harassment. In the case of harassment you can use these screenshots as evidence.
Some metrics people use to falsely assume a channel is being viewbotted include the following:
- Chat to View number ratio, if your channel is embedded like mine is across many webpages this chat to viewer ratio will be extreme. Another thing that it doesn't account for is viewers from /host. And do remember most established "TV Channels" do not have a chat room, many people watch Twitch streams without ever logging in.
- User names that all have similar creation dates, funny characters and other anomalies. This one is pretty simple, Twitch has tons of spam, spam bots and other crap that float around all channels. No channel owner can remove users from chat list, they can ban from talking only. Over the course of setting up filters to block spam, some of these bots just sit idle in the chat list. The more popular your channel, the more of these spam bots will accumulate. Some people have taking this to be a sign of viewbotting.
My word of advise for new streamers on Twitch.tv, it does absolutely nothing to go to others people's channels and do this sort of a thing. The only people who know for sure if a channel has been viewbotted is Twitch.tv staff. Focus on your channel, your content and
do not waste time dwelling other streamers numbers.
