A Guide to Automated Moderation on Twitch

Gaining exposure on Games Done Quick, as a runner, or commentator, onsite or on Hotfix, can grow your channel out of your usual audience. This can come at the cost of the control of your Twitch chat! This guide will cover the basics of automated moderation that cuts out noise in your chat and help preserve your personal stream culture.

Getting Started with the Basics

The first step you should take is to review the settings on your twitch channel. Twitch has a handy best practices article here which covers a lot of things, including their banned words list, link filtering, and AutoMod. Depending on the size of your channel, these values can be tweaked to suit your needs. The twitch recommended settings are perfectly fine for smaller to medium sized (read: < 400 people) channels.

Setting your channel rules is important. Chatters need to know what sort of conduct is acceptable when watching your stream. Consider keeping your rules short and concise, If your rules page is too long or has too many entries, people will skip over them. Keep them displayed in your stream information as well as in the twitch settings field.

The next step is to set up a channel moderation bot to help you out. There are many available, but this document is going to touch on two: Moobot, and Nightbot.

Moobot

Moobot is a chat moderation and command bot. It’s fairly simple and intuitive to set up, and some documentation is available here. This documentation covers integrating moobot with your channel, and creating informative commands that individuals in your chat can use.

Moobot’s moderation functions are available under the Chat Filtering dropdown in the sidebar once you have integrated it with your channel.

Message Filters allow you some finer control over what general content is permitted in your chat, such as emote spam, and linking. Moobot comes with a built in !permit command that works in tandem with the link filter.

The Blacklisted Phrases list allows you to individually single out words or phrases that you do not want to be used in your chat. It supports wildcards, but not regular expressions. This is the main appeal of chat moderation bots as it greatly cuts down on the manual interaction required to moderate your chat.

Whitelisted Links allows you to add links that bypass Moobot’s link filtering function.

Moobot also allows you to add your channel moderators as editors in the Permissions section using their twitch names.

Nightbot

Nightbot is a chat moderation and channel command bot similar to Moobot. Documentation on configuring Nightbot is available here.

Nightbot offers regular expression based chat filtering as well as simple wildcard based word/phrase matching, and has many of the same preset chat filters that Moobot offers.

Moobot and Nightbot serve similar functions, so it is best if you choose one and stick with it. The choice of which to use is entirely down to your personal preference. Make sure you read the documentation for the bot you wish to configure thoroughly when setting it up, as you may find yourself adding new filters as time goes on.

Once you’ve chosen your bot, load it up with all of the negative phrases or words that you can think of that you don’t want to see in your chat.

Other Things

To assist you and your channel moderators, it is advised that you (and they) install BetterTTV and/or FrankerFaceZ. These add very useful functionality, not limited to pausing chat movement when hovering over the chat window with your mouse, which means you aren’t trying to snipe nicknames, changing difficult to read colours such as spring green to something else so you can read nicknames, a dark mode, more granular timeout options, and a nickname and ban history.

Find trustworthy people from your community to help you. This isn’t explicitly necessary if you’re comfortable with banning people yourself, but the presence of one or two active moderators in the chat cuts down on trolling and offensive conduct significantly. For smaller streams, just having someone present to nip the bad stuff in the bud works wonders for keeping your chat clean.