How this works

Essentially this is a bot that tries to detect streams with fake viewers via the Twitch API and the power of statistics.

File layout (primarily):

bdb.py -> twitch_chatters -> handle_twitter
                |
                v
          twitch_viewers

Primarily, it looks at certain metrics such as the ratio between chatters to reported viewers. More bot detection methods are listed below or found in the source code (or the dev branch (which may or may not be 100% up to date)). Let me know if you see any other patterns in streams with fake viewers that i'm not taking into account by emailing me, or feel free to contact me with questions/anything at that email address.

I'm not necessarily accusing the streamers of botting their own channels. I'm not affiliated with Twitch.

Usage

"python bdb.py"

Note: To run it locally (not send out tweets), set "tweetmode" to False in global_consts.py.
Modules needed:

• Requests

If tweetmode,

• Twython
• Python-Twitter

Notes

• Some other detection methods:

  • Take into account the average chat viewer ratio for each game vs per user: maybe a bad idea - skewed by bots if a low number of streamers for a certain game
  • Long-term database storage of average viewer count
  • If the stream has more viewers than followers, there may be cause for concern.
  • More chatters than viewers, plus weird names/inactive chat => suspicion
  • Sharp, significant increases in viewers without proportional increases in the number of chat users (take into account videos in the front page of Twitch.. maybe check the front page of Twitch to see which user is there? On average how many users are watching via the main twitch page?)

• New heuristics for detecting chatbots: very low average follower count in chat (regarding how many people each user is following) is indicative of chatbots. Also if a lot of the bots have the exact same number (say, under 5).
  Or, if most of the followers are following the exact same streams.
  The main problems with these is that I need to individually access the Twitch servers for each chatter; this could take hours for certain streams with large viewer counts.

TL;DR

Go to http://www.twitter.com/BotDetectorBot!
Program usage: "python bdb.py"