Amazon-owned streaming company Twitch has announced the launch of a chat room feature that will exist outside the standard Twitch chat. Twitch first announced the feature back at its annual developer and fan conference TwitchCon in October last year.
“Whether you want a room for spoilers, permanent sub-only chat, or even a room for moderators to sharpen their swords, rooms lets streamers set a topic and choose who has access,” said Brian Petrocelli, a member of Twitch’s product marketing team, in a blog post. “Plus it’s just like stream chat, all your badges and emotes carry over.”
Called “Rooms,” these chat channels can either be public or private, and are designed to create separate channels for specific purposes. These rooms will be open 24-7, meaning that fans can hop in and talk to people even when a streamer isn’t currently active. Private rooms will be enabled for streamers who want to set up a separate area to talk to moderators or specific subscribers. For example, fans of a particular show can chat with the entire fan community on the public rooms, or they could chat with their friends about the same thing on private rooms.
“Whether you want a room for spoilers, permanent sub-only chat, or even a room for moderators to sharpen their swords, rooms lets streamers set a topic and choose who has access. Plus it’s just like stream chat, all your badges and emotes carry over. We’ve designed rooms to make offline chat better than ever. For example @mentions will notify the recipient making it easier than ever to keep the conversation going. And because rooms are built directly into the channel, it’s easy to get your entire community involved. Get a room, and join your community today on Twitch!” the company said in an official blog post.
A Twitch representative told Polygon that the broadcaster can set whether or not they are visible and/or accessible to everyone, meaning that not all private rooms will be discoverable. Permission to those rooms must be granted. The representative also confirmed that community guidelines apply to everywhere on our service.
To safeguard users against cyber-bullying, conversation and behaviour that occurs within private rooms will have to meet Twitch’s set of guidelines. These guidelines have been introduced to crack down on hate speech, harassment, and sexually suggestive content.
