I’m a moderator in a youtube livechat. Idiots are ‘cloning’ other users. They copy the real mod’s avatar and username, but I think they insert hidden characters (even though youtube claims it doesn’t allow that). The only difference is, the clone does not have a wrench. So if they clone a general user (without a wrench), it’s impossible to tell which one is real. I think they must have two windows open: One window for the chat, and another ready at the point where you cancel an account - and they post their idiocy, then immediately click cancel account. This means you cannot remove their post, and cannot ban them from chat. So you have to flood the screen with a dozen lines of garbage to get their message off the screen.
My two questions are:
Can a function be included, that continuously attempts to ban these morons… so when they do reactivate their account for those few moments to type their idiocy, they are “automatically” banned (and it informs the mods and channel owner that has been achieved)? So they get bored and move onto another chat room where they don’t have to constantly create new accounts.
I cannot find any information on NightDev pricing. Where is this info located?
This sounds like a bug for YouTube. Have you tried reporting this bug to them?
It’s unfortunate, but we do not have an adequate way to know who is a clone versus who is the real deal, with the exception of the broadcaster. On YouTube usernames are non-unique, so from an automation perspective both users look the same to Nightbot. While we could tell non-mods from ordinary users, Nightbot does not keep a list of mods in memory (we only keep channel data in memory, not chat nor users), and having to maintain a mods list by polling the YouTube API just for clone detection is not exactly something we want to do (there would need to be multiple uses for doing a resource intensive operation like that).