Twitch introduced this week that an upcoming change will enable streamers to dam banned customers from tuning into their streams. “You may select to have your banned chatters now not be capable to watch the stream,” Senior Product Supervisor Trevor Fisher revealed on Twitch’s Patch Notes podcast (through TechCrunch), stressing that the characteristic gained’t be enabled by default. The brand new blocking characteristic will roll out within the subsequent few weeks.

“The way in which that it’s going to work is for those who ban someone and so they’re presently watching, then the stream playback might be interrupted for them in order that they instantly lose the power to view the stream,” he defined. “After which for those who go offline, you stream once more, they gained’t be capable to watch your subsequent streams both till you select to un-ban them.” He mentioned it will have the identical impact no matter whether or not the streamer or a moderator bans somebody: That particular person can’t watch your streams till they’re unblocked.

One important limitation to the brand new characteristic is that it solely applies to logged-in customers: Anybody viewing a stream whereas logged out of their account can nonetheless watch it. Twitch isn’t blocking IP addresses (at the very least for now), which leaves room for the noteworthy exception.

Fisher burdened that that is an incremental change that solely partially addresses a few of the platform’s moderation issues, together with a number of girls accusing Twitch streamers of sexual abuse and misconduct. Different strikes to deal with the difficulty have included including a one-button anti-harassment software, enhancing its reporting and appeals course of, rewriting its neighborhood insurance policies and taking a stronger stance towards deepfakes. “We all know that that is an space the place folks need us to do extra, and it’s simply been delivery off one a part of the issue at a time,” Fisher mentioned.