Live events and predictions

You open them from the Events tab of the Gatherbot management screen. There are three of them, and each decides its outcome differently.

You need a stream in progress to open one, and only one event runs per channel at a time. Each viewer joins once, and a poll takes one vote per person.

You pick free, points or donation when you open the event. Viewers join with a chat command or the button on the viewer page — donation events are the exception, and take donations only.

• Free — anyone can join, nothing is charged
• Points — the entry fee you set is taken the moment someone joins
• Donation — the donation has to match one of the amounts you set exactly. An amount that is even slightly off is not counted as an entry, and chat or the button will not let anyone in

A points entry fee is charged immediately. Cancelling the event before the result is finalised refunds everyone in full, but once the result is finalised there is no cancelling and no refund.

• Set a capacity and no more entries are taken once the seats are gone
• You can restrict an event to subscribers. Subscription can only be checked from chat, so people have to join by chat and the button on the viewer page is locked
• A channel owner cannot enter their own event when it charges points

Entries close on their own when the time you set runs out, and you can close them earlier by hand. Anyone joining after that is turned away and is not charged. Finalising the result is the step after closing.

• A draw can be re-run after the result if you switched re-draws on. People who already won drop out of the pool, and the earlier round's winners stand
• Re-drawing is only possible if it was switched on when the event was opened. You cannot turn it on afterwards
• A poll lets you choose when results appear — right after someone votes, or not until the poll closes
• The entry list is not published while entries are still open

For roulettes and draws, so that no result can be decided in advance, a sealed value is published when the event opens, the entry list is fixed at closing, and the original of the value used for the draw is published once the result is out. Anyone can recompute the draw from those values and check they get the same winners. For a poll, the votes themselves are published once it closes, so anyone can count them again.

Part of a points entry fee is destroyed and the rest goes into the channel vault. Point prizes attached to items are paid out of that vault to the winners. What viewers pay in comes back to viewers of the same channel.

• An item with a point prize is paid to the winner automatically once the result is finalised
• Items that are only a label (one song request, picking the encore, and the like) are fulfilled by the streamer, who ticks them off on screen
• If the vault balance or the channel's daily payout limit gets in the way, the payout waits. Failed payouts are retried automatically and the management screen shows where each one stands

A prize that has been paid cannot be clawed back. That is why the worst-case amount the vault could lose, and what the vault holds right now, are both shown before you open the event. A setup that goes over the cap on what a single event may pay out — or one where the number of winners cannot be counted — is refused at save and at open rather than quietly trimmed.

Predictions do not pay fixed odds. The whole pool at the moment betting locks, minus the fee, is split among the people who backed the winning option in proportion to what each of them staked. The odds shown while betting is open are an estimate from the pool at that instant, so they move as people pile in.

1. 1Create the prediction and write the options (at least two)
2. 2Viewers stake points on one option
3. 3Lock the betting — it also locks on its own once the time you set runs out
4. 4Declare the winning option
5. 5Payouts go out immediately

• No bets are accepted after the lock, and a bet already placed cannot be switched
• One bet per person, and the channel owner cannot bet on their own prediction
• The minimum stake and the fee rate are set when you create the prediction
• The pool passes through the channel vault — the stakes land there and the payouts leave from there, and the fee plus any remainder that does not divide evenly stays in the vault

Declaring a result pays out at once and cannot be undone. Declaring it a tie or void, or cancelling the prediction, refunds everyone in full — and if nobody backed the winning option, everyone is refunded in full automatically.