Twitch Adds New ‘Shared Ban Info’ Feature to Help Streamers Identify Trouble-Makers!

Twitch has always had something of a problem regarding trolls within streamers’ chat channels. While moderators can, of course, look to curtail this problem in relatively isolated matters, this doesn’t really provide a solution for streamers as a whole. And, in fairness, and before I go any further, I don’t think there ever will be a total solution for this issue!

Following a new update to Twitch, however, an interesting new feature has been added that, at least in theory, will allow channels to collaborate more to attempt, wherever possible, to restrict or potentially block known trolls (or general trouble-makers) before they even get a chance to start.

Twitch Introduces ‘Shared Ban Info’ Feature

Known as the ‘Shared Ban Info’ function, this allows content creators to collaborate to effectively automatically share the username of people who have been banned from their channel. – While this requires requests to be both sent and accepted by other content creators, the idea is for streaming friends on the platform to loosely unionise their channels to collaboratively monitor known toxic elements in their chat. Thus, hopefully preventing, or at least restricting, their ability to spout toxicity to other people.

So, what exactly happens? Well, this is the overall gist of how ‘Shared Ban Info’ is intended to work:

• Steaming channel 1 and Steaming channel 2 join each other in the ‘Shared Ban Info’ feature
• Person A joins Steaming channel 1 and, through their comments, gets banned
• Person A joins Streaming channel 2 (which has ‘Shared Ban Info’ activated with Streaming channel 1)
• Steaming channel 2 receives a notification that a banned person has entered their chat
• From this Streaming channel 2 (and/or its moderators) can choose to ban Person A as well, or alternatively, simply keep a close eye on them. This can include having any message they post be perpetually pending approval
• If Person A appears to be behaving themselves, Steaming channel 2 can remove the ‘ban’ notification, but this will continue to appear should they join other members (such as Steaming channel 3) within the particular ‘Shared Ban Info’ group

Overall, it’s actually not a bad system and given the overall nature of channels often looking to help each other out, I can see this getting a lot of traction among the community. Even despite the fact that, for this preliminary launch, it is limited to a group of only(?) 30 channels.

Where Can I Learn More?

This new feature is reportedly available to access now through the content creators management dashboard. As above, overall, I think it’s actually one of the better new additions Twitch has seen for quite some time and, presuming channels do look to proactively get involved in this, should help curtail negative behaviour.

Of course, some will argue that you can sometimes be banned from a channel for a simple misunderstanding or a joke gone wrong. In truth though, this is probably quite an isolated problem to, overall, not make this too big of an issue. – If you do, therefore, want to learn more, you can check out the official blog post (and FAQ) via the link here!

What do you think? – Let us know in the comments!