Moderating Your Stream and Community and How to Report Harassment

If you are dealing with harrassment, manipulation, and verbal abuse in streams. I am truly saddened to hear this. To date, we've dealt with very few issues. Most streamers beyond the annoying spam bots have been most excellent in our streams. But streams are public to the world and we will all come across people who will troll streams just to rile others up.

It's YOUR Stream and Community

My hope is to encourage you as you deal with this issue. As a streamer, you have the right and responsibility to enforce your channel and community rules to keep your channel and other aspects of your community pleasant for everyone. This goes beyond Twitch or Youtube to Discord, Facebook, Tumblr etc. It's your rules there.
We simply expect you to abide by the ASC code (under Our Values). We keep it rules light to ensure you have the flexibility needed. The ASC officers and fellow ASC members are happy to help you how we can. Today, we are making sure you know the tools that are available.

Tools and Tips for Moderating

Because of the rise of hate raids, we've added a few links with more tips.

Tips for Dealing with Hate Raids

A Tech Advisor article - How to prevent and deal with hair raids on Twitch. One of the most comprehensive lists of tipsShyredfox has found.

Hate Raids Response Tools, a discord specifically to help share info on this topic. (Shared by Kahuna)

Commander Root and Sery_bot are helpful tools too. Info here as of 9/12/2021.

General Moderation

Ensure your channel rules are clear and visible in the about section and the list of channel rules that twitch pops up when people enter chat.

Ensure you have a mod bot.

Ask a fellow ASC member or trusted member of your community to cover mod duties for you if you can't be there 100%. (Sprints, demos, and things like that may prevent you from keeping an eye on the chat) Ensure your mods are on the same page as you regarding your channel's policies.

Get to know the /timeout, /ban, /clear, /slow, /block and /followers commands. You and your mods can also make private notes about the streamer to see what issues have popped up. Twitch has a page on managing harrassment that gives more details.

Don't argue with the troll, it's the equivalent of feeding/encouraging them. They will demand answers, but you are not obligated to give answers. You don't have to be a doormat. Don't be afraid to protect your other viewers and community members.

Reporting the Issue

If you repeatedly have troubles with a viewer or ASC member or ban and block someone and they keep pestering you elsewhere, please let us (the ASC Officers) know. We now have an issue reporting form. We will do what we can to keep an eye out and help stop harassment.

Also please report the issue to your community provider (Twitch, Youtube, Facebook).

The Future

Our officers are discussing what other options we can provide. Know that we will do what we can. Harrassment has no place in the ASC. We don't expect you or your viewers/community to tolerate it.