How to Moderate Stream Sound Alerts and Prevent Abuse
By Jamie
Sound alerts can elevate a stream’s entertainment value, but without proper moderation, they can quickly become disruptive or even harmful.
In this guide we’ll go over how to effectively manage alerts, filter inappropriate content, and implement safeguards against spam or abuse.
Just like how in a garden their are weeds you don't particularly enjoy seeing, in any community there are just certain words or phrases you don't want to see on day-to-day basis. While I could sit here listing choice words that may give you the ick, I'll take the high route and explain what tools we have to help keep your stream's word garden looking beautiful.
Custom Forbidden Words
On your settings page, we offer a simple flagging mechanism in the form of an input where you may provide a list of words you don't want to see or hear.
Of course sitting at your machine slinging thousands of years worth of profanity from your fingers isn't exactly an efficient use of time which is why we also provide a predefined bad words toggle.
In the event that you've connected Twitch we'll use your AutoMod to flag events & fallback to our system whenever that system is overloaded.
All events across any platform that occur on your stream can be seen here! We offer a few different ways to manage when events are played to help you prevent spam & abuse. You can quickly access your feed using the "Feed" option on the left side navigation rail while signed in.
Review Modes
We offer a few different settings for reviewing stream events. These settings will determine whether or not an event is played or placed in the Review bucket. All events will automatically be listed under Events & if they haven't been placed in the Review bucket, they will automatically be played in the order they're received, while items under Review will only be played once manually approved by you or a moderator.
Always Review Everything
All messages are placed under Review and require manual approval.
Great for streamers who want fine-tuned control of when & what is played on their stream. Very useful if you find that the sound alerts can be distracting or you'd like to give each constructed message the attention & love it deserves.
Play if Okay
Anything which is not flagged by moderation will be played. Anything which is flagged will be added to Review & will not play until manually approved.
For the general streamer this is our recommended way of handling things!
Never Review Anything
You never have to worry about reviewing anything- because everything is placed under Events & played regardless of your moderation settings.
Fantastic if you literally don't care what sorts of things people say.
Okay so we've got events coming in & some of them are showing up under Review, "how do I review them? Let's get right into that!
Event Approval
HOLD ON. I swear we're going to get into approval, but first let's mention rejection. Rejection sucks, but it's an important aspect of life.
Items under Events which don't offer an thumbs up icon are approved by default and will be played in the order of their arrival. However if you notice something you don't want to play, you can reject the event at anytime.
Note that if you switch from Never Review Anything or Play if Ok modes to Always Review Everything all unplayed events must be reviewed before they're played.
Delaying
Using the settings cog above the activity feed box, you can add delay between messages by setting the number of seconds you'd like between each message and you're set!
Other Tools
We also expose the a pause icon at the above the activity feed which allows pausing your queue from processing new events. It will even pause the currently playing event!
We also let you control the volume of your notifications directly in the UI.
And finally, if you don't like the alert that's playing, you can skip it at anytime by pressing the skip icon above the activity feed!
Moderators
Once a moderator has accepted your invitation they can perform any actions on your activity feed that you'd perform. If you have any questions on how to invite a moderator, check out our moderator invitation guide.
Having moderators gives your stream nifty approval flows, where you can focus on your stream & your moderators figure out exactly what should or shouldn't be allowed to play on your stream.
For instance...
- A bad message makes it past AutoMod, a moderator can quickly skip it once it starts playing.
- The event audio is a bit too loud or unbalanced with what you're streaming, a moderator can reduce it for you so you can focus on the stream.
- If a message is mistakenly flagged & skipped it can be quickly approved by moderators without a need for you to fix the issue.
Oh boy.
Just writing this felt like it took a while to figure out everything we provide so hopefully this was able to sum up just about everything we can do when it comes to helping manage & moderator your stream events.
While we've said it before, we want to make sure we're totally clear about this...
- If you've connected Twitch we'll run users' TTS messages by AutoMod to decide whether or not we flag the message. If you haven't connected Twitch we'll just use our moderation system.
- In the event of hitting your Twitch AutoMod limit we'll fallback to our moderation system.
As per usual I hope this guide was helpful & if you have any questions don't hesitate to checkout our discord!