Hate Doesn’t Belong Here: 3 Steps to Preventing Hate Raids on Twitch

If you’ve spent any time around Twitch lately, you have probably already become familiar with “hate raids.” Hate raids occur when a collective of bots attack a twitch streamer’s chat by abusing the raid functionality baked into Twitch. These bots wreak havoc for these streamers, who then have to go through and ban sometimes hundreds of accounts at a time, all while having to deal with horribly offensive comments. Twitch has been trying to work on their own solutions, which should be coming soon, but let’s go over some ways that you can protect and/or defend your stream from these jerks!

Now, I’ve been fortunate enough to not experience one of these on my own channel yet, so I reached out to a couple of our community members for some recommendations and best practices for dealing with them.

As the old adage goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. So what can we do to prevent this from happening in the first place? I’d suggest a two pronged approach. First, update your Channel Privileges for your account. This allows you to create restrictions on who can post, for example, requiring people to verify their account by email and/or phone. That alone will filter out a lot of bots. You can find these settings in the Creator Dashboard, under Settings>Moderation>Channel Privileges. While you’re in there, you might consider turning on Auto Mod if you haven’t already.

Additionally, you can pre-ban known, problematic accounts. There are a couple of great ways to do this. Two of our mods recommended a bot called Sery_bot, which will keep an eye on your following list, and immediately yeet any known problem bots. Noname Nerd Affiliate, TheChosen Bernard, also put together a full walkthrough for how to use an application called TwitchBanFromList, which automatically blacklists all known problem bots. I’ll drop a link to the video, along with any other helpful resources, in a linkdump at the end of this article.

Breen, one of our Discord community admins, has dealt with several of these attacks, including at least 3 separate attacks during a 12-hour charity stream marathon recently. She told me that, “Personally for us, I know we have a mod on standby checking the viewers list for any suspicious names, but for actual raids like the [ones] we got on Saturday, it’s a calm approach. I know for a fact it’s terrifying to get these raids, especially when you’re live and on the spot, but you have to keep a brave face.”

In addition to keeping calm, the biggest tool at her disposal is what is commonly known as a “panic button”. This is a commonly used macro that can be run from an Elgato Stream Deck (or other free tools like the LioranBoard Stream Deck extension for OBS). Some commonly suggested actions of such a multifunction button include disabling the alert box, disabling on-stream chat, switching to sub-only chat, creating a clip and or stream marker, slowing down chat, triggering an ad break, etc. It’s also worth making a button that will revert those settings, once things calm down, so you can get back into the groove as quickly as possible.

Once the raid is over, it’s important to finish cleaning up the mess. Be sure to save any clips you capture to your own machine for later reporting. Once that’s done, be sure to clean up any clips, and archival footage of the stream. After your stream, touch base with your mods, and see what went well, and what can be done better next time.

Twitch hate raids are horrible, but hopefully these tips will help you make them a thing of the past for your channel. Remember, we can prevent them by upgrading our channel privilege settings, keeping calm and using a Panic Button approach on an Elgato Stream Deck or other software option, and by constantly evaluating, especially after a raid, to make sure that our methods are working as well as possible. Try this three-step approach, and let us know how it works for you! We’d also love to hear any other methods you’ve had success with. And as always, stay tuned for more great tricks and tips!

LINK DUMP:

TwitchBanFromList walkthrough video: https://youtu.be/zo2mPwJSuL4

List of Panic Button tools and bots (including Sery_Bot and LioranBoard): https://hateraidresponse.carrd.co/#panicbutton