 Do you need some automated help moderating your chat, or want a little bit of help keeping chat moving during lulls and conversation? Setting up a chatbot can be a great solution to help you manage your chat more efficiently. Let's go through how to set up Stream Elements Chatbot step by step so you can focus on engaging with your audience. To get started using the Stream Elements Chatbot with Twitch, you have to have a Stream Elements account, have it synced to your Twitch account, and then get a chatbot join your channel as a moderator. If you already have a Stream Elements account, some of this will just be a quick review. So bear with me. First, make sure you're logged into Twitch with the account you want to bot the join. Then go to streamelements.com. If you already have an account, log in. If not, click Get Started to make an account and click Connect with Twitch. It should do the normal authorization flow that you're used to with these kind of things and land you right on your dashboard. You can use Stream Elements with YouTube, Trovo, or Facebook gaming as well, but this video is just going to focus on using it with Twitch. In any case, this should take you to the dashboard, where on the right you'll see a box that says Bot Settings. If you've already done this part, it'll say Part Channel and Mute. If not, there will be a Join Channel button and you should click it. Now go into your chat and type Slash Mod Stream Elements. Stream Elements all being one word. If you have not already done this, you might get a message saying that Stream Elements has been given mod permissions. If you have already done it, it'll say Stream Elements is already a moderator of this channel. Even if you think you've already done this, it's worth double checking and entering the command again until you get that confirmation message just to eliminate this as an issue. On the left, click Chatbot to expand the Chatbot menu and see a bunch of options. Let's look at the Chat Commands tab first. Right off the bat, you'll see a huge list of default commands that can be toggled on and off with the toggle to the left and configured by clicking on it to expand the form. I recommend that you browse this list and turn on any that you find useful. If this is your only Chatbot, I definitely recommend turning on some of the more basic things, like the exclamation commands command, which allows users to fetch a list of commands that they can use, the account age and follow age commands, which tell the user how long since they created their account or since they followed your account, and up time and watch time, which report the amount of time your stream has been live and the amount of time the user has been watching. Under Moderator Commands, I recommend Permit if you're going to use the Stream Elements link protection, which we'll get into later. And under Super Moderator Commands, I recommend Set Game and Set Title. Many of the other default commands that are available are useful too, but these are the ones I would recommend you add right off the bat. Let's go back up to the Commands command and expand it so we can see the configuration options for default commands. In this panel, you can configure the command in a number of different ways. To change the keyword that users need to type for this command, use the command field. In Stream Elements and most other bots, commands always start with an exclamation point. There's a cost field here too, which you can set if you're using the Stream Elements loyalty point system and want to make this command cost points. You can set that up using the loyalty settings from the left menu, but we're not going to get into it for this video. The user level menu allows you to control who has access to each command, whether it's open to everyone, restricted to subscribers, moderators, VIPs, or just the broadcaster. There's a user cooldown field where you can set the time an individual user needs to wait before using the command again themselves, and a global cooldown field where you can specify how long any user needs to wait after the command has been used. Aliases allow you to set extra keywords that trigger the same command. For example, you might set up a shout out command where you and your mods can use either shout out or SO. You also have a toggle that lets you set each command to work only when streaming, only when offline, or both. You'll notice that some of these commands have something listed in the module column, and that refers to a module that will need to be turned on for the command to work properly. Each module can be found in the modules page under chat commands, and we'll go through a few of them later, but feel free to browse through them and read about what they do. Now let's visit the custom commands tab on the chat commands page, and we'll look at how to set up some basic custom commands. Click the add new command button, and we'll go through what you can do here. You can look through the templates on the left to see some that can be built for you, and then modified, which is a great way to start. There are templates for a lot of things, from checking a user's loyalty point totals, reporting current subs or followers, there's even a template for a command to relay Twitch support's last tweet into chat. I encourage you to click through each of these, even if only to take a look at what the response field looks like for each of them. Get a little bit more familiarized with the variables and things that are possible with custom commands. If you want to dig deeper into the variables that are available, there's a link at the top of the page here labeled command variables. It's not quite as robust as something like Streamerbot or Sammy, but you can really do a lot with these commands, and I'll be making videos for some of the more useful custom commands that can be built. To explore the menu a bit further, let's make a simple custom command from scratch to share a link to something like a link trade page. Click new command on the left, and enter socials on the command name field. Set the user level as desired, and then in the response field just put something like check out my social media accounts and put your link, and then click activate command at the bottom. If you go into chat now and type socials, you should see this message and link appear in chat. If we go into the user management section, you can see a list of all your mods and VIPs and other users you have established as users with special permissions. You shouldn't really need this area very often, so we're not going to dig too deep for now. Let's look at the next section for timers, though. Timed messages can be used to welcome new viewers, remind chat of upcoming events, or even promote social media channels or donation links. To set one up, click timers on the left navigation under chat bot, and then click add new timer. For example purposes, we'll set up a follow reminder. So in the name box, we'll put follow remind. The name field is just so you know what the timer is for later. Users won't see it. The message field is where you put what you want the bot to post a chat. For now, we'll put something like if you're enjoying the stream, don't forget to hit the follow button. You can adjust the interval on the right under online interval. The default is five minutes, which is way too frequent for most streams. Look, timers are great, but you have to find the right setting so it's not just spamming your chat over and over. If you have a really active chat, this isn't that much of a problem, but in a fairly quiet chat, it can get really spammy really fast. So I recommend keeping your timer interval at something like 30 minutes, or at least 15. Offline interval is how often this timer fires when you're not streaming, which I don't see mattering that much. You can turn it off entirely or make it super slow. If you have ideas on what might be fun for some offline timers and commands, let me know in the comments. I'm always curious how people treat their offline chat. Finally, the chat line slider allows you to prevent a timer from firing, even if the appropriate amount of time has passed if there hasn't been enough other activity in chat. This is a really good way to prevent the bot from just posting the same message again and again with nothing in between. Depending on your chat volume, I recommend setting this to at least five, if not 10 or 20. That means that at least five, or 10 or 20, lines of chat from the users, other than the bot have happened since this timer fired last. You may notice the add message button down there. You can press this to add additional chat messages that can be sent out in rotation using the same interval. If you add multiple messages here, each time the timer fires, the bot will send one of these messages to chat. Then the next time it fires, it'll send the next message, so on and so forth, until it gets to the end and loops back to the first message. Now let's move into the modules we briefly mentioned before when reviewing default commands. Click modules in the left under chat bot to open the modules page. Each of these can be expanded to display a variety of configuration options. I encourage you to review the list of modules here yourself. The majority of them, like roulette and slots and gamble and things like that, depend on the loyalty point system. It can be great fun and a good way to promote engagement in chat. But we'll do a whole separate video about the loyalty system in these modules. If this is the main bot you're using, you're definitely gonna wanna turn on the chat alerts module. When you expand it, you'll see a set of options for many different events, such as a new follower, tips, cheers, raids and so on. We're not gonna go too in depth here because there are several options for each of these. But I encourage you to set up at least some very basic chat alerts for each type of event, to thank people for their follow or sob or whatever. These chat alerts also help you as a streamer keep track of those events and allow you to show appreciation appropriately on your own. Keep in mind, these are just chat based messages. The alerts that play sounds in a video or whatever when people sub, that's a whole separate area of stream elements that we'll cover in a different video. Okay, now let's take a look at the spam filters section of the chat bot. Click spam filters on the left under chat bot and you'll see some of the auto moderation tools available through stream elements. You can enable protection against capital letter spam, links in chat, emote spam, wall of text protection and excessive use of symbols. You can also set up a banned word list. Everyone has their own preferences, but if you're not using any other moderation tools, I would recommend at least turning on the link protection module and establishing a list of banned phrases if you're not already doing so with Twitch's native tools. Emote spam protection is a funny one to me because the Twitch community as a whole seems to really celebrate spamming emote and I really enjoy it when it happens in my stream so I don't see any reason to prevent that. I personally also find that excessive caps, paragraph and symbol protection all tend to cause more trouble than they solve but feel free to play around with them to suit your own needs. Everyone's chat is different. Under link protection, you can set the length that users will be timed out when they violate the rule. I usually set this really low like five seconds and set the exclude group to note one. Moderators will still be able to post links and if you enable the default command permit that we talked about earlier, you can allow moderators to temporarily allow links upon request by typing exclamation permit and then the user's name and then that user will have 60 seconds where they are allowed to post links. One thing to note depending on how you have your Twitch link setting set up, links may still be blocked even if the user is given permissions with permit. We'll go into the native Twitch auto mod settings in another video entirely but since we're already talking about this, let's take a quick look at where this setting is in Twitch. In your creator dashboard, go to settings and moderation in the second section labeled chat options, there's a ban hyperlix toggle. If you want stream elements to have control over link moderation, just leave this toggle off in Twitch. I recommend familiarizing yourself with the rest of the Twitch auto mod settings as well as they're getting quite comprehensive and can now do most of what people used to have to rely on bots like stream elements for. For now, let's go back into stream elements and look at one more auto moderation tool, the band words list. These days, I generally just recommend doing this inside of Twitch's moderation settings but stream elements provide some good options here to establish different rules for different lists of bands phrases. You can group your band phrases into separate categories with varying extremes of consequences or you can lump them all into one group. To create a new group, click create new group, give it a name like racial slurs or aggressive language or band words, then establish how long you want the user to be timed out if they violate the rule. You can check to scan usernames and or chat messages for the words in each group. You can also specify what level of user can be excluded from these rules. I don't see any point in excluding anyone from band words, however. If you don't want those words being used in your chat, why would you allow your mods to use them? Doesn't make any sense to me. Anyway, you can optionally enter a message that will be reported in the band reason box if you wish and then under band phrases you can start creating your list. Click add new band phrase and type the word you want. Then click add new band phrase and type another word. If you want to get really fancy, you can use regular expressions here but we're not going to get into that right now. Keep adding as many phrases as you want until you're satisfied. You can always come back here and adjust it later. Once you're done defining your group of band phrases, click save and then make sure the group is toggled on in the top left. You can click the test filters button at the top to test these now if you wish. You can type a username or chat message you want to test and click the test button and it'll let you know if any of your band words groups have caught that message. One last thing, you want to go back and click spam filters to get the main spam filters menu and make sure that the band words section is toggled on itself. Now we have a basic chat bot set up, some simple commands for both viewers and moderators to use, some basic alerts, timed messages, moderation tools and the know how needed to make new custom commands. Speaking of custom commands, check out this video on how to make a custom shout out command in stream elements.