Content:
- How to prevent people from posting links in your chat
- Method 1 – Disable Links in Twitch Chat
- How to manage links with Nightbot
- Step 1 – Night Bot Modification
- Step 2 – Set up link moderation in Nightbot
- Summarizing
If you start growing on Twitch, you will undoubtedly have people coming out of the tree and trying to advertise your loyal followers. Link spam occurs wherever there are people to click on. So, if you have spammers in your chat, congratulations. You are doing something right.
So how do we stop these link spammers from messing up our chat and potentially tricking or infecting our viewers with viruses? Let’s jump in and go through it step by step.
How to prevent people from posting links in your chat
There are several ways to do this. In this article, I will talk about two different ways.
Method 1 – Disable Links in Twitch Chat
Twitch has a feature built into their system that allows us to automatically disable links in our chat. This will completely prevent normal viewers from posting any links.
Moderators, administrators, VIPs and you will still be able to post links.
To access this feature, follow these steps:
- Open Twitch.tv
- Go to your profile picture in the top right corner and click on it.
- From the menu, select Contributor Toolbox.
- In the creator toolbar, click Settings -> Moderation.
- On moderation, scroll down to the chat option -> Block hyperlinks.
- Make sure the switch is on
That’s all. Viewers will no longer be able to post links in your chat. Only moderators, administrators, VIPs, and yourself can post messages.
If you don’t want to completely block links, Twitch has another option called Non-Twitch Delay. This is a setting just below hyperlink blocking and allows your mods to view messages a little before they appear in chat.
This gives them the opportunity to delete the message before the rest of the chat can see it. This will allow them to remove links before they even appear in the chat. If you’re using this feature, you’ll need to make sure your mods are working properly and remove these comments as they appear.
How to manage links with Nightbot
Another way to manage links is to use a third party bot like nightbot. This gives us more freedom as we have the option to block a link but whitelist certain links we want to allow on our channel.
To set this up, you need to set up nightbot. If you haven’t created a night bot account yet, go to the night bot site and sign in with your Twitch account.
Once you are logged in, you will need to modify the night bot on your channel.
Step 1 – Night Bot Modification
To modify the night bot, go to Twitch and open your Twitch channel. To do this, navigate to your profile picture -> Creator Dashboard -> Chat Window .
In chat enter /mod nightbot
This modifies the Night bot in your chat, allowing you to use commands in your thread.
Step 2 – Set up link moderation in Nightbot
Now that you’ve modified the night bot on your channel, we can set up link moderation. To do this, open the night bot and click “Spam Protection” on the left. Scroll down and click on options in the links section.
In the options section, we can create a whitelist. This is where the night bot has more options than Twitch’s built-in link protection.
All links will be automatically blocked by the night bot unless you whitelist them. For example, you might want to whitelist youtube.com, twitter.com, etc. because you know they are safe and your viewers might want to send you a video for verification.
In the whitelist section, if you add https://twitch.tv , all links from twitch.tv will be allowed. However, if you add https://twitch.tv/yourchannel , viewers will only be able to link to that particular channel.
You can also add https://clips.twitch.tv so people can share your clips in chat.
Whitelist – Whitelist any websites you want your viewers to be able to share via chat. Separate each website by pressing the enter button.
The timeout duration is the amount of time users posting non-whitelisted links will timeout.
Exempt User Level is the level at which you can post any link. I recommend setting this at the moderator level.
The custom message is the message that timed out users will see when they time out.
After you complete each section, you can click “Submit” to save your settings. Nightbot will now moderate your chat for non-whitelisted links and weed out anyone that doesn’t follow the rules.
It’s probably a good idea to specify what’s allowed and what’s not in your rules for your broadcast.
Summarizing
By using one of these two methods, you will be able to stop link spammers in your chat. Now you can enjoy your broadcast without worrying that your viewers will click on dangerous links in your chat.