Twitch will soon let you block banned users from seeing your stream

Twitch will soon let streamers stop banned users from viewing their broadcast, offering one more tool to help fight harassment on the platform.

Announced during its Patch Notes stream on Wednesday, Twitch is adding a new setting which will allow streamers to choose whether or not viewers who are banned from chat are also blocked from being able to see their stream altogether. The new feature will be toggleable in users' dashboards, and is expected to roll out in mid to late September. 

"We've gotten a lot of feedback over the years, to be honest, that people want their channel bans to do more," said Twitch's senior product manager of community health Trevor Fisher. 

"The way that [the new feature] will work is if you ban somebody and they're currently watching then the steam playback will be interrupted for them, so that they immediately lose the ability to view the stream. Then if you go offline then stream again, they won't be able to watch your subsequent streams either until you choose to unban them."

This new viewing block will also be added to Twitch's block feature, meaning users who are blocked as opposed to banned will automatically be barred from watching the stream as well. This won't be a toggleable setting, but an inbuilt part of blocking a user.

Unfortunately blocking someone from viewing your Twitch streams won't completely Thanos-snap you out of their universe. Banned or blocked users won't be prevented from watching VODs or clips, only live broadcasts, however Fisher noted that Twitch is looking into adding that functionality.

"This is something where we've had to make kind of a lot of really incremental progress," said Fischer. "We know that this is an area where people want us to do more, and it's just been chipping off kind of one part of the problem at a time."

The viewing block also isn't an IP ban, so Twitch's stream ban will only work if blocked users are logged into their accounts. A determined harasser could therefore log out of their account to circumvent their ban and watch a stream anyway, though they wouldn't be able to participate in the chat since Twitch requires chatters to be logged in.

Fisher noted that "there are some complications that come along with trying to do things with IP bans," but stated that Twitch aims to build on its viewer ban feature to eventually give it more power.

Harassment has long been an ongoing issue on Twitch, the platform having previously rolled out features such as shared ban lists and its suspicious user detection tool in an effort to stop the trolls. Letting streamers block viewers from watching their broadcasts won't completely solve the problem in one fell swoop. Even so, it should help creators feel just a bit more comfortable and in control of their stream.