This guide will be more catered to tournament organizers but some most of it is still generic enough and applicable enough to other streamers as well potentially. As a tournament organizer, one of your best tools at your disposal during the event is chat moderation. Having an automatic setup is absolutely key in having a good chat experience for those in your channel. If you haven’t already, check out some best practices on what to plan for in an esports event, marketing your esports event and dealing with esports publishers. Bonus, if you’re feeling extra paranoid check out my article about esports insurance for events.
Imagine your production team fires up the stream, the TTours happen and the NA production hits. Instead of KEKW’s (RIP Mr Juan Joya Borja), you get greeted with a channel full of phishing links, racist spam and general awfulness of some twitch chat events. So how do you deal with this or mitigate it? You can A) have a ton of actual mods (which is great) B) have a bot do all the work (which is great too) or C) a mix of both (recommended!)
Please note, this is not an exhaustive how to. Others are way better than me at channel management but here’s some tips that I used for events. There’s a good nightbot wiki which gives even more examples.
How to add nightbot to your channel
Sign up for nightbot and then you will be present with a dashboard. You need to make sure nightbot is in your channel at all times so it can moderate. The dashboard should look something like this:
You’ll want to click join channel on the top right and then you’ll be presented with a screen like this:
You want to go into your channel and type /mod nightbot. Afterwards, If I type the same command again nightbot is now a mod in my channel. I can tell by the following:
Ensure that you have modded Nightbot in the channel. If Nightbot is not a moderator, it cannot function properly.
To triple check nightbot is a mod and in your channel. You can also click the top right where it shows users in channel.
Nightbot Custom Commands as a tournament organizer
Since nightbot has been added as a mod to your channel and is ready to lay the banhammer. You can add some custom commands as a tournament organizer if you want.
Back in the day, when twitch didn’t show how long a stream was on for, you could do something like this $(twitch beatesports “{{uptimeLength}}”). This would show you how long your stream has been online for. However, nowadays this command isn’t very useful anymore. So I’ll list a few that are more useful but pretty basic.
Some useful ones as an organizer could be:
| !casters | Casters are Trent (@TrentPax) & Zyori (@ZyoriTV) go give them a follow! |
| !bracket – | Find the bracket at https://liquipedia.net/dota2/Dota_2_BEAT_Invitational/Season_9#Results |
| !schedule | You can find the full details of the bracket + schedule at https://beat.gl/schedule/ |
| !giveaway | Check out our giveaway at https://billelafros.com |
This will save you from having to paste the schedule and instead can type the command on the right ie, !schedule and it’ll show from nightbot. Also, viewers can do it as well and help you out.
Nightbot spam protection setup
Arguably one of THE MOST important features of nightbot is the spam protection setup. This will save you a ton of work. Here’s some recommended spam protection settings you should turn on and why.
Blacklist Words/Phrases – YES. Turn this on. How this works is the following:
- Things are getting wild, twitch chat is going full twitch chat and spamming the same phrase or a specific phrase but over and over again. You decide they need a time out. You can add the phrase to the blacklist and nightbot will time them out for a specific period. It depends how long you want to do it for. 2-5 minutes is a good rule sometimes. You can also give them warnings first generally before it comes up.
- Make sure it’s silent ban or nightbot will just flood your chat.
- A quick tip is to allow subs to be exempt from this (depending on how many subs you have, you may want to raise it to mod etc)
Excess Caps – This one I don’t usually have on but the same rule applies. IF twitch chat is unruly with the caps you can have a no caps rule.
Excess Emotes – This one I turn one sometimes. I’ll leave it on when things are wild and there’s someone pasting 200 emotes at once. You can use your discretion on how many emotes you want to timeout for here.
Links – 10000000000000% you want to filter these. You also want to filter them to MODERATOR only. The reason why is because sometimes people sub, drop a random shitty link and then get banned anyways because they used a stolen payment. The best solution is to WHITELIST domains you trust.
You can give a warning and a timeout. 600 seconds may be long so try to keep an eye on twitch chat if it was a legit link and un-timeout the person if it was fine link that you forgot to whitelist.
I also do not keep this on silent so people know only specific links are allowed.
Excess Symbols – Basically excess symbols is something like this but in twitch chat:
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Good to use this one when people start spamming the symbols that go off the chat channel.
Repetitions – This is when the copy pasta hits and the spam is high. Know when to turn this on / off. For example (one of my personal favourites)
Sodium, atomic number 11, was first isolated by Humphry Davy in 1807. A chemical component of salt, he named it Na in honor of the saltiest region on earth, North America.
Nightbot Timers – How to use them as a tournament organizer
For nightbot timers, you can use them to advertise, show your viewers the schedule, tell your viewers about the casting pair or send out general reminders to them. My favourite ones are schedule reminders, viewer + sponsor thanks and sending out updates if I need (aka someone is out of the tournament and why).
Here’s how you’d set up a timer in nightbot.
Go to timers on the left hand side -> then go to add at the top right.
Afterwards, a screen pops up and I can add a name, a message and control how often it shows up and after a specific amount of time.
If you want to add bonus timers and custom command variables you can get pretty fancy with nightbot. For example, I’m a streamer and want to let my viewers know when the next match is (if I follow a set schedule). I could do this !commands add !startinggame The next match is starting in $(countdown 4:00:00 PM EST). That counts down the current time to 4PM EST and will tell your viewers. For a full list read the nightbot wiki.
Nightbot chat channel logs – How to check and use them
This one is important to keep a log of what was said in chat. Good to go back on sometimes. Nightbot automatically keeps logs of chat.
It looks something like this:
| Date | Display Name | Message |
| Apr 30, 2021 9:23:56 PM | BEATesports | !bracket |
There you have it! Some tips and tricks to manage and setup nightbot as a tournament organizer. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment or contact me.