 Are you new to streaming or just looking for an easy way to help manage your Twitch chat? Setting up a chat bot can be a great solution to help you manage your chat more efficiently. Let's go through how to set up Nightbot as a first-time user. In this video, we'll cover the basics of setting up Nightbot for Twitch and go over some of its features. Let's get into it. First things first, you're going to need to go to Nightbot TV and sign up or log in using your Twitch account. It's worth mentioning that Nightbot also works with YouTube and Trovo, but we'll be focusing on Twitch streaming for now. Once you're logged in, you should be directed to your Nightbot dashboard. The next thing you'll need to do is get the bot to join your channel. In the top right corner of your Nightbot dashboard, click Join Channel and follow the prompts. Once the bot has joined your channel, you'll need to grant moderator privileges to Nightbot by typing slash mod nightbot in your Twitch chat. If you've already done this, you'll get a confirmation that Nightbot is already a moderator. And if not, you'll get a message saying that they have been made one. Even if you think you've already done this step, it doesn't hurt to do it again just to get that confirmation. Now that you've got Nightbot in your chat, let's take a look at the Commands tab in your Nightbot dashboard. Here, you'll find a list of all the default commands that Nightbot comes with, as well as the option to create your own custom commands. Before we dive into creating custom commands, let's review some of the basic commands that come with Nightbot. Under Commands on the left, click Default. I highly recommend taking some time to peruse the default commands and familiarize yourself with their functionality, but we'll go through a few of them that I recommend you enable right off the bat. The exclamation commands command will display a list of all the available Nightbot commands that you have enabled in your chat. Let's open up the options here so that we can see the kind of things that can be configured with these default commands. The options here are pretty straightforward. There's a drop-down you can use to specify who has permission for each command. For this command, it's set to everyone, but you could change it so that only VIPs or subscribers or moderators could use it if you want. Keep in mind, some of these default commands have other functions that will only be available to moderators, regardless of this setting. There's also a slider that lets you set the cooldown for this command. This is the amount of time and seconds that has to pass before this command can be used again. Let's scroll down to some of the other default commands that I recommend turning on. The exclamation game command will display the current category you're streaming in Twitch. It'll also allow you and your mods to update the Twitch category from chat easily. Let's click the docs button here, and you'll see that for each of these commands, there's a page that explains how it can be used with some examples. For this command, the docs tell you that you can just type exclamation game and allow it to put the current Twitch category. This command by default is available to everyone. However, moderators can type exclamation game and then a new game name to change the current category for the stream as well. Further down the list, there's also an exclamation title command that works the same way, but for the stream title. There's also a tags command that allows you and the moderators to edit your stream's tags from chat. There's also an exclamation marker command that lets you set a stream marker, so you can easily find a moment later when reviewing your VOD to make a highlight or a clip. Now let's dig into the real meat of the commands in Nightbot or any chatbot for Twitch, for that matter, custom commands. This is where you can build a lot of the commands you see all over Twitch, like lurk or socials, shoutout command. Really anything simple like this can be built with custom commands in Nightbot. We'll do individual videos later about how to build many different custom commands in Nightbot, but for now, let's build a socials command to explore the options here. Click commands and custom in the left navigation and then the add command button in the top, right? To start building a new custom command. Enter exclamation socials as the command and then type the desired message that includes your social media links in the message box. Something like, check me out on social media and then a link tree link or something. The user level and cooldown controls are the same as they were for the default commands, where you can restrict access to this command and set a cooldown period between uses of this command. Finally, there is an alias box. We're not going to get into this today, but this can be used to create a special command that will simply trigger one of your other commands. If you're interested in a separate video of what can be done with Nightbot aliases, let me know in the comments and we can put something together. But as a beginner, I wouldn't recommend the mess with this too much right now. Next, let's take a look at the giveaways. Nightbot offers three different ways to run a giveaway in chat. The active user method will randomly select any user out of all the eligible active users in chat. You can narrow down who is eligible with the controls at the top. By default, anyone who is not a moderator is eligible, so long as they have been active within the past five minutes to win. I'm not 100% sure what Nightbot uses to determine whether a user is active, but my guess would be that it's based on whether or not they have chatted recently. You can give subscribers and or regulars a boost of luck for this type of giveaway too, if you wish. Once you are ready to run the giveaway, just click roll it at the bottom and Nightbot will choose a winner. Print it out in chat. The second method for giveaways is the one I recommend the most, and it's definitely the most common as far as I've seen. This is the keyword method. Basically, you can establish a special keyword or command that users have to enter to be able to register for the giveaway. As in the other version, you can narrow down who is eligible based on user type. You can also boost luck for subscribers and or regulars, if you please. Finally, there's a setting to disqualify users who spam the entry keyword. Once you're ready to run the giveaway, just click roll it at the bottom. Finally, there is the random number method. Basically, you can have Nightbot pick a random number, and then once you start the giveaway, users have a certain amount of time to type random numbers and guess which number Nightbot picked. And once someone finds it, they win. Unfortunately, it seems kind of buggy. It's hard to tell why there are multiple entries from the same user count, and it's just kind of awkward. So I don't really recommend using this version, but feel free to try it. The next item in the navigation is logs. Nightbot keeps logs of all your chat activity, which can be useful for reviewing your chat and identifying potential issues after stream. But beyond that, it isn't particularly interesting for us right now. It is searchable though, which can be useful as a streamer, if you remember a conversation topic but want to look it up later and see what was said. The next section is called regulars, which allows you to create kind of a custom group of users who have been active in your chat. This can be useful for giving special permissions for commands or giveaways, or as a simple way to reward frequent viewers. Next, we have song requests, which can be a cool way to do music in your stream and allow your users to pick songs, but we're going to leave that for its own video. Music is such a polarizing and touchy topic for Twitch that I don't really want to make recommendations about it. Bottom line is that playing copyrighted music on your stream is a risk, and unless you have license to play that music on your stream, I wouldn't recommend doing it. Hit me up in the comments if you want to talk more about how to find music that won't get you in trouble. The following section is for spam protection. Here you can set up some basic auto moderation tools to keep chat under control. You can enable protection against capital letter spam, emote spam, links in chat, excessive use of symbols, and repeated words and phrases. You can also set up a blacklist of words and phrases that you want banned from your chat. 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 blacklist for words and phrases if you're not already doing this with Twitch's native tools. Emote spam is kind of a funny one to me because the Twitch community as a whole seems to celebrate spamming emotes, and I generally enjoy it when that happens in my stream. 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 needs. Everyone's chat is different. Let's set up link protection. Under links, click options, and you can set a whitelist of domains that are allowed all the time, and the length that users will be timed out when they violate the rule. I usually set this really low, like five seconds. I don't really want to time out the user that much. I just want the link to be deleted. Moderators will still be able to post links, and you can also extend this to VIPs or regulars with the exempt user level drop down. You can also check the silent checkbox and have it set so Nightbot will quietly time out users instead of sending a message about it. On the other hand, you can set a custom message for when people get timed out saying, hey, you're not allowed to post links here. One thing to note, depending on how you have your Twitch link settings set up, links may still be blocked even if the user is given permissions through Nightbot. We'll go into the native Twitch auto mod settings in another video, but since we're already talking about this, let's take a 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 hyperlinks toggle. If you want Nightbot to have more control of link moderation, simply leave this toggle off in Twitch. I do recommend familiarizing yourself with the rest of Twitch auto mod settings as well as they're getting quite comprehensive and can now do most of what people have used to have to rely on bots like Nightbot 4. Now let's go back into Nightbot and look at one more spam protection tool, the blacklist. Honestly, Nightbot's implementation of this really doesn't add anything that Twitch's native tools can't already do, so I recommend just doing this within Twitch. If for whatever reason you prefer to have Nightbot handle it, you can. Just open the options button here next to blacklist words and phrases and set up some basic options there. Let's move on to timers though. Time 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 in the left navigation and click add in the top right. For example purposes, we'll set up a follow reminder. So in the name box, we'll put follow reminder. The name field is just for you to know what the timer is for later when you want to edit it. Users won't see this name. The message field is where you put what you want the bot to post in chat. For now, we'll just put something like if you're enjoying the stream, don't forget to hit the follow button, something like that. You can adjust the interval, which is how often this timed message will get sent to chat. The default is 15 minutes, which is too frequent for most streams. Look, timers are great, but you have to find the right setting so it's not just the bot spamming the same thing in chat over and over. Do 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. The chat line slider also helps you keep nightbot from spamming chat. It allows you to prevent the timer from firing even if the appropriate amount of time is passed if there hasn't been any other activity in chat. This is a really good way to prevent the bot from just posting the same message over and over again with nothing in between. Depending on your chat volume, I recommend setting this to at least five, if not 10 or 20 lines. This means that at least five lines of chat from users other than the bot have happened since this timer fired last. The alias field is the same as it was for custom commands where you could have this timer execute one of your other commands. Press submit at the bottom and your timer will be set up. Now we've explored the dashboard, have a basic chat bot setup, some simple commands for both viewers and moderators to use, a few basic moderation tools, timed messages, and the know-how needed to make new custom commands. Speaking of custom commands, check out this video about how to make a custom shout-out command in Nightbot.