Deprecating notification and Live Role commands
Before the dashboard existed, the only way to add notifications was via the “!twitch notif add” command. Since then we’ve shifted our development efforts to prioritize the dashboard over commands and as a result, notification and Live Role commands have fallen by the wayside, receiving no updates when we announced new features (such as Webhooks v2, or Live Role Notifications).
After a bit of internal discussion, we have decided that it would ultimately be the best if we removed these commands in order to continue giving a consistent, easy-to-use experience with Streamcord. So, starting on March 1st, you’ll no longer be able to manage notifications and Live Role through Streamcord’s Discord commands.
Edit: It seems like many people were confused by our initial announcement. To clarify, nothing about stream notifications or Live Role is changing. The only thing that is happening right now is that the !twitch notif add command will be removed, so you’ll have to manage Streamcord in your server through the dashboard.
Why did we choose to remove these commands?
Let’s take a step back and look at some metrics about command usage for Streamcord. From here, we can see that the ‘add notification’ command was used about 3,400 times in the last month.
3,400 may sound like a lot, but when we compare that to the fact that about 38,000 legacy notifications were created in the last month, the ‘add notification’ command equates for just 11% of those notifications, which means the other 34,600 were created from the dashboard.
From a development standpoint, it’s really not worth having two methods for adding notifications if one of those methods is only being used by 11% of users. Deploying updates to Streamcord’s commands can take up to 30 minutes, and might result in some downtime for users, whereas pushing updates to the dashboard takes just 30 seconds.
Starting today, if you run a !twitch notif or !twitch lr command, you’ll be greeted with the following message:
And, of course, on March 1st, you will no longer be able to use those commands, instead the bot will display a message telling you to use the dashboard.
What if I don’t want to / can’t use the dashboard?
We understand that some people may not want to use the dashboard, and that adding notifications directly through Discord is a lot easier. Unfortunately, we don’t really have a workaround as of now. Maybe in the future we’ll look into using the new slash commands that are available to bots, assuming that the technology improves.
If you’re unable to connect to the dashboard, or have any other suggestions or feedback, consider filing a bug report or leaving a suggestion in our Discord server; it helps a ton to know everyone’s opinions.
As outlined in our 100,000 servers post, we’ve got a major dashboard redesign coming with UX, design, and accessibility improvements. We don’t have a set date for when the new dashboard will be ready, but we definitely want it to release this year.
As a side note, we’re also looking for potential new developers to help us with new features like the dashboard redesign. If you’ve got experience with Kotlin, Python, and/or Nuxt, consider messaging me (Akira#1000) on Discord, or email us at pr@streamcord.io.
Consider following us on Twitch if you haven’t already! The staff team has been streaming more often, and we’d like to see you around sometime. Come check us out at https://twitch.tv/streamcordbot.
As always, thanks for supporting Streamcord.
— Akira
