If you are starting to grow on Twitch no doubt you will have people coming out of the woodwork trying to advertise to your loyal following. Link spam happens anywhere there are people to click. So, if you have spammers in your chat, congratulations. You are doing something right.
So, how do we go about stopping these link spammers from ruining our chat and potentially scamming or giving viruses to our viewers. Lets jump in and go through it step by step.
How to Stop People Posting Links In Your Chat
There are multiple ways we can do this. I am going to cover two different ways in this article.
Method 1 – Disable Links In Chat On Twitch
Twitch actually has a feature built into their system allowing us to automatically disable links in our chat. This will completely stop regular viewers from posting any links at all.
Moderators, admins, VIPs and you will still be able to post links.
To access this feature follow the steps below:
- Open Twitch.tv
- Navigate to your profile image in the top right and click it
- From the menu select Creator Dashboard
- In your creator dashboard click on Settings –> Moderation
- In moderation scroll down to Chat Option –> Block Hyperlinks
- Make sure to slide the switch to on
That’s all there is to it. Viewers will now not be able to post links in your chat. The only people who will be able to post are moderators, admins, VIPs and yourself.
If you don’t want to block links completely there is another option within Twitch called Non-Twitch delay. This is the setting just below block hyper links and allows your mods to view messages slightly before they appear in chat.
This gives them the opportunity to delete the message before the rest of your chat sees it. This would allow them to delete links before they even appeared in the chat. If you’re using this feature you need to make sure that your mods are on point and deleting these comments as they come in.
How To Manage Links Using Nightbot
Another way to manage links is by using a third party bot such as nightbot. This gives us more freedom as we have the ability to block link but whitelist certain links that we want to allow in our channel.
To set this up you will need to set up nighbot. If you haven’t created a nighbot account yet head over to nightbots website and login with your Twitch account.
Once you have logged in you will need to mod nightbot on your channel.
Step 1 – Mod Nightbot
To mod night bot head over to Twitch and open you Twitch channel. To do this navigate to your Profile Picture –> Creator Dashboard –> Chat Box.
In the chat box type /mod nightbot
This will mod the Night bot chat bot in your chat allowing you to use commands in your stream.
Step 2 – Set Up Link Moderation In Nightbot
Now that you have modded nightbot in your channel we can set up our link moderation. To do this open nightbot and click on Spam protection on the left hand side. Scroll down and click on options on the link section.
In the options section we are able to create a whitelist. This is where nighbot has more functionality than Twitch’s built in link protection.
All links will automatically be blocked by nightbot unless you whitelist them. For example you may want to whitelist youtube.com, twitter.com etc as you know they are safe and your viewers may want to send you videos to check out.
In the whitelist section if you add https://twitch.tv then all links from twitch.tv will be allowed. However if you add https://twitch.tv/yourchannel then viewers will only be able to link to that specific channel.
You may also want to add https://clips.twitch.tv so people can share your clips in your chat.
Whitelist – Add any websites in the whitelist that you want your viewers to be able to share in your chat. Separate each website by hitting the enter button.
Timeout Length – This is how long users who post un-whitelisted links will be timed out for.
Exempt User Level – This is the level at which you will be able to post any link. I recommend setting this at Moderator level.
Custom Message – This is the messaged timed out users will see when they get timed out.
Once you have filled in each section you can click submit to save your settings. Nightbot will now moderate your chat for un-whitelisted links and time anyone out who is not following the rules.
It is probably a good idea to include what is and isn’t allowed in your rules for your stream.
Wrapping Up
By using one of these two methods you should be able to stop link spammers in your chat. You can now enjoy streaming without worrying about your viewers clicking on dangerous links in your chat.
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