Every open platform attracts its trolls, and I’ve had my fair share of them. Since I stream to multiple platforms, I have to remember the “ban” commands for each one, as they work slightly differently. Perhaps that’s an idea for another article.
I’m used to dealing with Mixer’s /ban command, which immediately kicks a viewer out of the chat for good. I can reverse that decision in the web interface at a later time. Twitch also has a /ban command, but it does not remove the user in question from the chat, it merely hides their replies in my own feed.
To ban a Twitch user in the same way as we do on Mixer, we need to use the /block command. This is followed by just the user name without the @ sign, like this
block /SchlonzMeister
To reverse this decision at a later time, we can use /unblock in the same way. So to bring SchlonzMeister back, we do this:
unblock /SchlonzMeister
A less extrem option is the /ban command on Twitch. It does not remove users from the entire stream, instead it will hide their responses from your chat feed. You’ll still see an entry in that place, but it just says it’s a “hidden message”. Twitch calls such users “ignored users”. You can /unban people just the same.
Sadly though, Twitch does not currently have the ability to show a list of blocked or ignored users in one place, like Mixer or YouTube do. There is a third party open source tool that can display ignored (banned) users. I’ve not heard of such a tool for blocked users – if you know of one, please let me know.