How to Deal with Trolls on Twitch, Part II

In our previous post, we’ve given you some general info about trolling and different types of trolls on Twitch. Today, we’ re going to share some practical tips on how to handle trolls in your chat. Basically, we distinguish three main techniques to try on, depending on the severity of the problem:

#1. Kill Your Enemies with Kindness

This strategy is good, if you have only 1-2 trolls in the chat and can easily identify them from the crowd. Often, they are people who just fool around in search of fun and entertainment. And before banning them, you can try to convert them into your loyal audience. Your mods should dissuade trolls by treating them like friends or welcomed opponents in the discussion as well as constantly reminding the chat not to feed trolls. If the “kindness” technique has no success, you can always ban unwanted guests. N.B. It is important to make sure that your moderators are on the same page with you before you start battling with trolls on Twitch. Discuss all plans concerning trolls with your mods in a separate chat.

#2. Get Rid Off Trolls

If trolls don’t give up and continue spamming and ruining your peaceful chat atmosphere, elaborate the plan on how to take them out of discussion. You should ignore all trolls in the chat. Just pretend that they don’t exist. Before that, make your mods known that you decide to ignore specific people, so that they can play along in your interests. N.B. In case you are a beginning streamer with no mods, we advise banning persistent trolls. If you play a fullscreen game and don’t want to interrupt it, you can open your Twitch on a phone and type /ban <username>.

#3. It’s Time for Solid Actions

If nothing helps, and trolls continue to drive you crazy by making a total chaos in the chat, organizing a spambot raid and bombarding you in social networks, email, etc., it is time to take further steps. First of all, try to play it cool: don’t get angry and lose control. Things are bad, but you are still at the head of situation. The plan is as simple as below:
  • Turn off notifications in your Twitch chat
This is relevant, if trolls make fake donations, what they do really often. Trolls invent nasty fake account names that pop up when making donations. By turning off notifications, you despoil one of their pleasures.
  • Turn on a “subscribers only” mode
Of course, this measure will affect your real non-subscribed fans, but it is very effective. You can turn on this mode even, if you are not partnered with Twitch. This will disrupt all trolls’ attacks. Once the trolls’ communication has been cut off, look over your chat to ban all signs of trolling presence.
  • Turn off a “subscribers only” mode
The API queue will automatically refresh and your notifications will appear again. This way, all backlogged trolls will be cleared out. These actions won’t promise that no trolls will enter your chat anymore, but, at least, for some time you can enjoy the “trollless” chat experience.
  • Get a Bot For Your Chat
Bots, such as the popular Moobot, helps monitor chat activity and reduce the amount of malicious links with inappropriate content and viruses. Trolls usually search for small streaming channels, because there are more chances that beginning streamers don’t have a Bot or even mods.

How to Deal With DDoS attacks?

DDoS attack literally means a “Distributed Denial of Service.” This is a troll’s or hacker’s  attack to make online service unavailable to you. Attackers infect user computers via software, email or social networks and create a network of infected computers, usually called “botnets”. The strongest botnets unite millions of computers and constitute a real threat even for governmental and most secure websites. DDoS attack is very common thing, seeing that one can buy a week DDoS attack on the black market for as little as $150. During DDoS attack, your server is overwhelmed with traffic from multiple sources (it can be multiple connection requests or random data) to make your IP blocked and your Internet access disappear for some time. Hope that our small guide will help you deal with DDoS attack:
  • It Doesn’t Last Forever
After a DDoS attack, your Internet connection will be restored in 1-2 hours (in some cases, it may be longer, even for a few weeks). So, if a DDoS attack has happened to you, don’t panic. Think realistic. Find other temporary place to make your streams from. Work on your security.
  • Simple Precautions
When a DDoS attack happens, immediately disconnect your router and remove Skype and similar apps from your computer. The latter programs are usually used by hackers to get your IP. Then, plug your modem back and wait for the Internet to appear.
  • Don’t Let Trolls on Twitch Win
Even if the DDoS attack has occurred to you during your stream, pretend that it hasn’t. Tell your chat audience that there were some Internet problems. If you show in the chat that you feel defeated and disparate, you’ll give the trolls additional power.

How to Deal with Viewbots?

View-botting is a common practice among trolls on Twitch, when a special bot artificially increases the number count on your viewer list. Thus, when you are view-botted, it will appear more concurrent viewers on your channel than you actually have. View bots can be also accompanied by chat activity bots trying to imitate the streamer and viewer interaction. The main aim of this practice is to make your account banned by Twitch. Though today’s Twitch support has been improved, there still happen situations when streamers’ accounts are unfairly banned because of view-botting. If you suspect the viewer or chat activity bot in your chat, try to perform the following actions:
  • Apologize to your audience for disconnecting your stream for a while. The viewbot app will automatically lose connection from the trolls’ end.
  • If when you turn on your stream, you’ll notice that your viewer count has fallen dramatically, then you were view-botted. Report suspicious accounts to Twitch support. Or better delegate this task to your mods. Twitch has a special list of inveterate trolls and ban their IP.
  • If the situation repeats often, it may not be a troll. There can be a situation when some enthusiastic viewer is trying to do something good for you by attracting more viewers to your stream.

Takeaways

Twitch chat is a prefect place where one can interact with like-minded people, laugh, gain inspiration and teach new things. But, like anything else in our life, with all good things, there is always something bad. Dealing with trolls on Twitch is an inevitable and less pleasant part of any streaming experience. To handle trolls on your channel, first of all, find good mods and choose a Bot. Never give up because of troll, at least, because they rarely attack dead-end streamers. Even if the worst thing – DDoS attack, for instance, - happen to you, keep your play streaming as soon as you have a connection. Don’t make trolling a larger issue than it is. And remember a simple rule “don’t feed the trolls”, as the main motivation for a troll is your reaction. As soon as you learn how to ignore trolls, they will become bored and get off your back.

9/11/2017