[00:00] Spam bots, Follower bots and 8 filled bot raids can really suck the fun out of your stream. But have no fear because today I'm going to show you how to set up the built in Twitch tools that will completely stop all bots from affecting you, your viewers and it won't hurt your growth at all.
[00:13] All that and more coming up but first, thank you to our sponsor OWN. OWN your one stop shop as a streamer has created an entire Steam editor and integrated it into their free version of OWN Pro. This means not only can you get full overlays from webcam borders, alerts, labels and more set up in literally 3 clicks,
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[00:39] If you want to support me, check out the link in the description to try out our own Pro's new free scene editor and more. Straight out of the gate, let's break down what Spambots, Followbots and Botrates are so you understand what we are actually defending against. If you already know all of this, then click the time code to go ahead to where we're actually going to start the tool.
[00:54] Spam bots are the classic one of these famous messages that you see in your chat every now and then. These are bots that troll through Twitch looking for certain side streamers and then drop spammy scam links. You'll get a lot of these selling terrible graphic design jobs for you. And while these can't actually hurt you unless you click the link, which
[01:08] will be impossible to do if you follow the stepways in the video, they're just a little bit annoying. A follow bot is when someone or a group of individuals might be using bot accounts to follow the channel on mass. It could be 5, 10, 15, or it could be thousands
[01:21] of accounts following you at any one time. As you stream you'll slowly learn what a bot follow looks like, usually from the name, it'll be something simple but likely with a string of numbers after it. And a bot raid is usually when you're hit by a combination of these two, of the follow bots and the chat bots. They'll usually spam hateful slurs
[01:36] or aggressive messages, or sometimes they'll be really custom messages directed directly at you, like, hey, take off your beanie if you're not bald you fat bald f- That's just a random example, I don't think anyone's ever said that to anyone in particular.
[01:49] All of the things I've just mentioned are done to troll and disrupt your stream, and I think it's really important to say that being botted, whether it's your chat or your follows, cannot hurt you. It feels scary at the time, or a bit disheartening, but the only way they can negatively impact
[02:02] you is if you let them. You cannot be banned from being follow-botted, and if you set up the tools I'll show you in today's video, bots can barely even affect your stream. I used to get botted constantly, but my chat never even knew, and I had way less tools
[02:14] than what Twitch offers these days. Yes, the very first time it happens to you, it can be daunting, but have no fear, let's Let's cover the steps you need to take in order to handle it and you'll feel much better afterwards. First, what can we set up before going live?
[02:26] Well everything you need these days is built into Twitch When I started streaming I needed external tools to do everything we doing today but now you won need to give moderation privileges or access to your entire channel to a random third party tool or random bot made by some random dude you never met
[02:41] because thankfully Twitch have just gone above and beyond for us. So if you go to your Twitch dashboard and go to settings then moderation you'll find all your moderation settings to help protect you. Let's go through these top to bottom. First, auto mod ruleset. Clicking
[02:53] this will show you a lot of different examples of filtering you can set up and you can change either manually one by one to be more or less protective or simply pull the level of moderation bar at the top. You might also have access to their smart detection tool like I do that holds
[03:05] messages it believes are highly likely to be deleted, banned or timed out in general. For this section I like to set mine to filter aggression slightly and then decent filtering on race, ethnicity and religion. You might want this stronger, personally mine's quite low because
[03:18] it was catching my viewers when we were talking about Chinese takeout so I lowered it back and instead added manually blocked phrases which I'll show you where they are right now. If you go back back to your settings and scroll down and click blocked phrases, which I am not going
[03:30] to do because it's a giant list of phrases I never want to appear or be said in my chat, so slurred mostly, which obviously I'm not going to flash you here. It's pretty simple though, click this, open it up, and add phrases, that's it, it's blocked now. You'll often
[03:42] get told to put your personal information in here so that it can't appear in your chat, such as your full name, phone number, address, whatever it is, and I can tell you right now, that's dumb as hell. Blocked phrases don't do anything except stop that exact phrase being posted in your chat.
[03:55] So if someone finds your phone number or your full name, but isn't 100% certain it's actually yours, they can come to your chat while you're offline, post it, get confirmation they have your private information, because why else would it be blocked in your chat?
[04:09] And then they can do awful things with it. By posting a blocked phrase, that person doesn't get automatically banned. They don't get automatically reported to Twitch. There's literally no downside to them. And if they really wanted to post that information in your chat, they can just add some space bars
[04:21] or write it a little bit differently. It heavily encourages that rather than giving them a tool to confirm your details, instead simply don't react and quietly deal with the situation through bans and other methods offline to protect yourself. It's also worth noting that any moderators you have can see all of the blocked phrases
[04:36] unless you edit those phrases to be private blocked phrases in a blocked phrases section. If I say blocked phrases one more time, I'm going to die. So, below that is permitted phrases, which is the exact same as blocked phrases, but essentially it's in reverse. If Automod keeps grabbing a term and stopping it, but you think that term is totally okay,
[04:51] then add it as a permitted phrase. Next, suspicious user controls. This is a great tool. In short, it works to see if chatters are actually banned chatters on new accounts trying to get around your band. It can of course false flag so I personally set this to monitor only This just alerts my mods and myself that the person is someone we should watch If you closer to the streamers you can also share ban info So say that I add my mate Reap
[05:11] Anyone he bans, anyone I ban will be banned in the other person's chat as well. If we continue scrolling down, you should always have hyperlinked blocks. Don't be an idiot. The lay is up to you. I don't use it personally, but if you want mods to get a second to see messages before they hit your chat, you can absolutely set that up.
[05:25] Now, channel privileges. This is your dream come true. This will protect you entirely from bots, follow bots and chat based trolls. This lets you set rules about what types of accounts can follow and or chat on your channel.
[05:37] Now personally I have these very lenient but it still stops 99% of the bots that I was getting. I tested streams with this on and off and I also got no major drop in my chatters or followers either. So anyone who says that using this tool is going to hurt your viewers is being very dramatic.
[05:52] I set mine so that any chatters and anyone who wants to follow the channel needs to have their email verified and linked to their account and if they don't have that, well then they can only seek or follow the account if it has existed for more than two weeks. The reality is most bot
[06:06] accounts are deleted and caught by Twitch before they reach two weeks old, so this completely eliminates the threat on your channel and if that changes and people get around that, well you can always increase the time or if you want add phone verification. Personally I don't like adding phone
[06:19] verification because I hate giving my phone number to companies, so I understand why Chatters wouldn't wouldn't want to either and I only use it as a last resort. Trolling down we have chat rules, these are pretty simple, there's nothing fancy about them, they don't actually do anything except make someone click yes I agree to the rules
[06:32] for entering. Then we have unban requests, again things are used to control you a little bit extra while pretending they're asking to be unbanned. And then this amazing new feature, stop banned users from viewing a stream. What a great setting, I absolutely love it, if I'm banning someone I don't want them
[06:45] to go watching me afterwards. There are some more tools just below that but these aren't things you want to set up now. They're things you'll want to use while live if something goes wrong. So instead, let's jump into that section. So, follower-only and sub-only mode. These are two tools I see being used by
[06:59] small streamers all the time. And when I ask why, it's either because they're trying to stop the wannabe famous bots or the graphic design bots, or they think it will get them more followers, subs, and chatters. The short answer is usually these modes will kill any chance of getting new
[07:13] chatters, because people don't want to follow you just to see if the content and the community are And the idea of using them to stop some boring and small bots is like saying you're cutting off your arm because you bruised it. The only time these need to be used is if the Twitch auto-mod tools we set up earlier
[07:26] aren't stopping a bot raid in your chat. But then again, if you're going to use these, well that means you don't know what shield mode is. But don't worry, because we're going to set that up right now. Go to your Twitch dashboard and then go to your stream manager Bottom right of the chat click the cogwheel and click Shield Mode We going to set up a series of rules and effects to happen to our stream and by that I mean it should already be set up for you
[07:45] By default it should clear chat, turn on full verification, set follow only mode, slow mode and a mod delay, while making auto-mod much stricter as well. You can adjust everything I've just said as you can see here on stream, but personally
[07:57] I left it as default. With all of this set up, you can then go back to your stream manager and go to your quick Actions tab, which is usually by default on the right, you'll click Add, search for Shield Mode, and add that here. Now, if a bot attacks, it gets through the basic auto-mod that we set up earlier, which
[08:10] is incredibly unlikely, but if it does, you click this, or the little shield icon at the bottom of the chat, and, well, you'll be fine, because things will just not be able to get through at all until they calm down, and then you can turn it off. Now, I will show you what to do after the stream is done, and how to deal with any bot
[08:25] followers you do get, as well as talk about how sometimes the content we make can actually increase the chances of getting polybotted. But I want to quickly say that how you react personally when trolls, bigots or idiots do things like this is really important.
[08:37] A lot of people get upset when I say this, but if you show or let someone see they have succeeded in negatively affecting you, if you let them know they've thrown off your stream, then you're going to have it continue to happen. The only reason they are doing any of this is to get a reaction.
[08:51] So the best thing you can do is not give them one. Smile through and continue the content. If they don't feel like they can get a reaction out of you, they'll move on, especially if your auto-mod keeps stopping them from actually doing anything.
[09:03] But what do you do after the stream? Say you've finished everything off and you did get hit by a couple hundred follow bots. Well, a lot of people recommend using a tool called Commander Root to remove the followers you got at that time. But I'd think too many of you guys remove not just the follow bots, but every single follower you've ever had on the channel.
[09:19] So instead, I recommend just reporting the follow bots that actually hit you to Twitch, and you'll find a day or two later, they'll be gone. You don't even need to report all of them, just a handful of them usually work. And if not, well, who cares? Followers don't matter at all on Twitch.
[09:32] It's a dumb metric that after reaching 50 for affiliate means literally nothing. But here's the thing, and this is what will actually help you deal with bots, trolls, and hate online better than any auto-mode or steward mode, and that's just accepting that people online can kind of suck.
[09:45] As creators, we're putting ourselves out there to be viewed, and in turn, we're going to be judged both positively and negatively. We're going to be seen by the right people and the wrong people. It's just normal. There are things you can do, obviously, like make content that appeals to older audiences,
[09:58] or not go into the Minecraft category, but at the end of the day, just make what you love, and if you do it well, the right people will make up for the wrong people. We're here to learn how to be discovered in this new age of streaming, and click here to become a member of the channel for just one dollar. I'll see you guys next week.