Moderating Large Twitch Streams
I moderate a Twitch stream that tends to be on the larger side (2,000 average variety, 10-20,000 Overwatch, 60-100,000 special events), and through some trial and error (and tips from others) I've come up with a set-up that makes moderating large chats fairly easy. The first step is getting Chatterino. It's a free and open source chat client for Twitch that has some nice customization options. Once installed and logged in, get the following set-up (customized as you want):
General
- Pause on mouse hover: 2s
- Timestamp format: h:mm
- Link Previews: enable
- Advanced: tick Uptime, Viewer count, Category, untick Automatically close user popup when it loses focus
Highlights
Here I make First Messages a red-ish color, and I add a custom mods message highlight in orange so it's easy to see when people are calling for mods. You could also add one for the modCheck emote. I have the sounds disabled because the chat likes copy-pastas and if one involves the word "mods", I don't want constant noises going off.
Ignores
These vary heavily by stream. I usually add bot commands and responses that will be heavily used, such as for drops. Uncheck Case-sensitive and check Block
Filters
Here I just have a first-time chatter filter. Click Add, set Variable to first message?, and change contains to (nothing). Once done, add a new chat tab, click to join the Twitch channel, then click the three dots in the top right, click Set Filters, and select the filter you just created. Now in this second chat tab you'll only have messages that are from first-time chatters. This is handy for when you go AFK for a bit and just need to quickly scan for bad first messages.
Hotkeys
Here I just add a shortcut to ban, using the B button. Click Add, set Category to Popup Windows, Action to Usercard: execute moderation action, Keybinding to B (or whatever you want), and Arguments to ban. Now once you click on a user to bring up the user card, you can simply hit B to immediately ban them. This combined with pausing chat scroll on hover makes banning people very quick.
Now that you have Chatterino set up, go to the Twitch moderation screen by either clicking the sword icon in Twitch chat, or by simply placing /moderator/ inbetween https://www.twitch.tv and the name of the channel. Once there, start customizing it to your liking, starting with removing chat since you'll be using Chatterino. Personally, I have the stream up top, with 3 panels below it made up of Mod Actions, Suspicious User Activity, and Automod Queue. Now you have your turbo-nerd moderation dashboard set up and are ready to moderate your heart out.
Some random thoughts and tips
- First chatter highlights will catch the majority of ban-worthy messages. When chat is really flying I mostly just pay attention to these
- Sometimes someone will say something odd but not really ban-worthy. In these cases I'll just click on their name to bring up their usercard and leave it up. Then if my hunch was right and they need a swift ban, you already have their card up and can simply hit B
- I tend not to do anything if people are just negative for a message or two. If they're consistently negative, then I'll do something. If someone says "this game is thrash" and leaves it at that, I'll just ignore it. If they keep at it and start baiting chat, then I'll timeout.
- For streams where you anticipate a lot of bot commands flying in, StreamElements supports adding cooldowns to commands with
!command options !commandName -cd numInSeconds, for example:!command options !drops -cd 20 - Self-promo (or promotion of other streams) is an instant ban.
- Rarely you'll get some sort of bot raid where bots flood your chat with messages. I've found the best way to deal with this is either enable follower-only mode or subscriber-only mode, then ban the ones that made it through before you switched it on. Leave that on for a bit, then disable it 10 minutes or so later.
- AutoMod can do a lot of heavy lifting. Just add any words you definitely don't want coming through and it'll take care of them.