Twitch chat and moderation

Quick frame, before the rules section. Twitch predictions live inside Channel Points: viewers stake points on a coming in-stream event, the streamer calls the result, the winners split the pool. Predictions shipped December 12, 2020 — binary outcomes only at first. June 2, 2022 the cap got bumped to ten. This page covers the rules, the timer, the point ranges, the moderator carve-outs, the cancel-vs-refund flow, plus a clean walkthrough. Numbers below — checked against Twitch's help portal and the Helix dev docs as of 2026.

Twitch custom messages cover everything from a subscriber's 255-character resub banner to bot-driven auto-replies, Channel Point text rewards, /announce highlights, and pinned chat. Alex here: this guide separates each type, explains who can send what, and shows the exact setup steps with Nightbot, StreamElements, and Streamer.bot in 2026.

Harassment on Twitch arrives in three shapes: one rude viewer, a coordinated hate raid. A slow drip of borderline messages your audience reads as neglect. Each shape needs a different response. This 2026 playbook walks through the official toolkit Twitch shipped between 2021 and the December 2025 Lead Moderator rollout, the chat commands every broadcaster should memorize. Hit this Saturday with a creator. The third-party automation that fills the gaps Twitch still leaves open.

Twitch has no public DM inbox. The platform's only built-in private channel is the whisper. A one-to-one message that lives in a separate panel from public chat. Use it and you need three things: a verified phone number on the account. A recipient who has not switched off whispers from strangers. A sense of the rate limits that quietly cap most senders at forty new conversations per day.

From eight years on this dashboard, a Twitch raid sends every viewer in your stream over to another live channel. You type /raid channel_name, a 90-second confirmation window opens. See it weekly in office hours. At zero the audience pours into the target chat carrying your channel name with them. A creator I work with hit this last week — this guide covers the command, the receiving side, who can fire it, why hate raids changed the rules in 2022, and what realistic growth looks like once the dust settles Worked through this with a Variety streamer on Saturday..

Nightbot is a free, cloud-hosted chat bot for Twitch and YouTube Live. You sign in at nightbot.tv with your Twitch account, click Join Channel, type /mod nightbot in your stream chat, and the bot starts running custom commands, timers, and spam filters within five minutes. The whole stack is free, with no paid tier required to get extras that competitors lock behind a subscription.

Twitch chat on screen is a free engagement upgrade. Done right, the same browser source carries names, badges, BTTV emotes and a transparent background that does not fight the gameplay. Done wrong, you ship a white square that eats CPU and viewers cannot read. This guide walks the popout URL, the dimensions that fit a 1920x1080 canvas, the custom CSS streamers actually paste, the StreamElements and Streamlabs widgets, the BetterTTV / FrankerFaceZ / 7TV trick, plus the Stream Deck button that toggles chat on and off mid-stream.

Mod View is the dedicated dashboard moderators load at twitch.tv/moderator/<channel>. It bundles AutoMod, Shield Mode, the Suspicious Users widget and a chat panel into one screen so a moderator can review, ban, time out and approve appeals without bouncing between tabs. This guide walks through every widget, the 2024 iOS rollout, the 2025 Lead Moderator role and the chat commands a working mod uses every stream.

Twitch chat is the loudest part of any stream and the most misread one From eight years of running Partner onboarding for an agency.. It looks like a comment box. Hit this Saturday with a creator. Behaves like an IRC channel, and runs on rules that change every few months. Look — this guide walks the full surface in plain English: the 500-character message cap, native and subscriber emotes, third-party emote browsers like BTTV, 7TV and FrankerFaceZ, the colour and whisper commands, cheermotes, mentions, chat replay in VODs, and the phone-verified chat policy that started catching out viewers in 2024. Alex here: read it once, and you'll know what every icon, badge and slash command is doing on screen.

Twitch's slash-command list is already past 50, and the platform keeps shoving stuff around. Three-year recap, real fast: /host hit the bin October '22. /shield dropped that November. /shoutout, /pin landed September '22. /warn went live June '24. Below: every working command (verified at help.twitch.tv as of 2026-05). Grouped by who can fire it, with exact syntax, plus the gotchas that catch people sideways. Bookmark once. Skip the second tab.

Once a Twitch chat starts moving faster than you can read, role assignment stops being optional (this is the exact line I gave a creator last week). The platform now ships seven distinct roles that decide who can ban. See it weekly in office hours. Who can edit your stream title, who bypasses slow mode, and who can change moderation settings the broadcaster used to control alone.

A Twitch poll is a built-in viewer voting feature, available to Affiliates and Partners, that lets the broadcaster or a moderator post a question with two to five answers and a 1 to 10 minute timer. Viewers cast one free vote, and optional Channel Points or Bits unlock extra votes for power users. This guide covers the exact rules, the chat-command path, the Stream Manager path, what mods can and cannot do, the mobile-app gap, and the third-party fallbacks for streamers who have not hit Affiliate yet. Every spec is checked against Twitch's help portal and the Helix Polls API as of April 2026.