When it goes wrong: raids, trolls and bad nights

Every channel gets a bad night eventually. A hate raid, one persistent person, a joke that lands wrong, a regular who turns out to be someone else entirely.

What separates channels that recover in a day from channels that lose half their chat is almost entirely preparation, because in the moment itself you will have very little attention available.

Do these before anything happens

Twenty minutes now, once:

• Turn on followers-only mode with a delay. A day or a week. It is the single most effective anti-raid setting, because raids run on accounts created minutes ago, and it costs a genuine new viewer only the small inconvenience of following.
• Add a blocked-terms list. Slurs and their common obfuscations, plus anything specific to your situation. Automatic deletion is faster than any human.
• Know where the emergency switch is. On Twitch that is a combination of followers-only, subscribers-only and slow mode. Learn the path before you need it, because finding a settings panel while something is happening is awful.
• Give your mods explicit permission to escalate without asking. In writing, in the brief.
• Have a break scene with a hotkey. Going to a still frame for two minutes is a legitimate response to almost anything.

During: the response order

1. Stop reading it. Your instinct is to look. Do not. Nothing in there is information you need.
2. Switch chat to followers-only or subscribers-only. Immediately. This ends most raids within seconds because the accounts are new.
3. Let mods clean up. That is what they are for and they do not need you supervising.
4. Keep playing, or take the break. Both are fine. What matters is that you are not performing distress to an audience that includes the people who caused it.

Do not read the messages out. Do not argue. Do not explain to chat what is happening while it happens — you are narrating someone's attack for them.

The one persistent person

Different problem, different response. Someone who is not breaking any rule but is exhausting: correcting you constantly, sulking, making everything about them, needling at the edges.

• Do not do it live. A public dressing-down makes them a martyr and makes everyone else tense.
• One clear private message. Name the behaviour, not the personality: "when you correct my play in chat it takes the fun out of it for me — please stop." Most people stop.
• If it continues, remove them, quietly. You do not owe a long explanation and you should not have a debate. A channel where one person's comfort outweighs everyone else's is not a community.

The hard part is that this person is often a long-standing regular. That is exactly why it drags on, and why chat will quietly thank you afterwards.

When you are the problem

Sometimes the bad night is yours: you are tilted, short with people, sarcastic in a way that is not landing.

• Notice it, and say so plainly. "Sorry, I'm in a mood, it's not you."
• Take the break. Two minutes of a still frame is nothing.
• Do not push through a stream that is making you worse. Ending early is allowed, and "I'm not in the right headspace tonight, back Thursday" earns more respect than three hours of grinding through.

Your community can handle you having bad days. What it cannot handle is not knowing which version of you it is getting.

Afterwards

• Say one short thing, once. In Discord, the next day, calmly. Long post-mortems keep it alive.
• Check on anyone who was targeted. If a raid went after someone specific, a private message from you means a great deal.
• Change one setting. Whatever would have made it smaller. Then stop tinkering.
• Do not change your channel permanently because of one night. Locking everything down forever punishes the people who did nothing. Tighten, then loosen again in a week.

The thing to keep hold of

These nights feel enormous and are almost always invisible to most of your audience. The people who cause them are transient; the people who stayed are not.

Handle it briskly, be kind to the people who were in the room, and go back to the thing you were doing. Recovering calmly in front of your community is, irritatingly, one of the more bonding things you will ever do.

Next: a Discord that is not a ghost town.