Twitch.tv: How to Add Words or Phrases to the Permit or Block List

Twitch chat is a core part of a Twitch stream community. It allows you to interact with your viewers directly and for your viewers to chat amongst themselves. This level of interaction helps viewers to feel more involved and makes it more likely that they stick around and become regulars.

Part of the process of encouraging a community involves managing the type of messages in the chat. While chat rules are a helpful starting point, not everyone will follow them. That’s where moderators come in, you can give people your trust the ability to delete messages from other users, keeping your chat clean. If your chat is moving too fast, however, it can be difficult for the moderators to keep up. To help support the moderators, you can use Twitch’s AutoMod feature, to automatically flag messages certain messages for review.

You can also extend AutoMod by manually banning or permitting certain words or phrases. Entries included in the block or permit list will be completely, automatically handled, and won’t require any moderators to take action.

The two lists function slightly differently from each other. For example, the permit list, only allows you to define specific exceptions. With the block list, however, you can use an asterisk as a wild card. For example, “hate*” will block “haters”, “hateful” and “hated”.

Phrases in the block list will block any message containing all of the contained words. For example, adding “hi everyone” will not block messages only containing “hi” or “everyone” but will block messages containing “hi everyone”, “everyone hi”, as well as “hi, it’s my birthday everyone”.

How to configure blocked or permitted words and phrases

You can configure the blocked and permitted words and phrases in the creator dashboard. To open the dashboard, click on your profile picture in the top-right corner, then click on “Creator Dashboard”.

Once in the creator dashboard, expand the “Preferences” category in the left column, then click on “Moderation”. The second and third options from the top, labelled “Blocked terms and phrases” and “Permitted terms and phrases” allow you to configure the block and permit list.

To add an entry to either list, click on the list in the moderation preferences menu, then enter a word or phrase in the text box and click “Add”. You can edit an entry by clicking the pencil icon, or delete it by clicking the trashcan icon.

You can mark entries in the block list as public or private. This setting is used to specify if your moderators can see the entry or not. moderators can see public entries but not private entries in the block list.