Twitch comes with a chat feature in which viewers can comment and ask questions to the live streamer. For [interactive lectures](Interactive Lectures) this can be a good way to receive questions from the students.
Due to the large and uncontrolled setting however, it is probably wise to ask one or more teaching assistants to be present to moderate chat in addition to enabling "slow mode". This can be done by clicking "Chat Settings" and then "Slow Mode". The interval you select determines how often students are allowed to type something in chat. We recommend selecting at least 10 seconds to prevent an overflow of comments from students.
##### Enabling Slow mode
To this end:
On Twitch it is common for users to "spam" lots of messages very quickly. With al kinds of jokes and emoji/emoticons quickly filling up a stream's chat. To prevent users from spamming, you can enable "Slow Mode".
This can be done by clicking "Chat Settings" and then "Slow Mode".
The interval you select determines how often students are allowed to type something in chat.
We recommend selecting at least 10 seconds to prevent an overflow of comments from students.
##### Automod
Twitch comes with a free automated moderation service that can monitor chat for racist, sexist, or other undesirable comments. This moderation service can be configured to some degree, but has four basic levels.
Please refer to [this page](https://help.twitch.tv/s/article/how-to-use-automod?language=en_US) to see how to configure it.
We are currently using Automod at level 4 (which is the most strict setting), as we believe serious questions about course content should not be caught by this. If you experience the mod blocking messages incorrectly at this setting, please do let us now!
##### Teaching Assistants as moderators
Due to the large and uncontrolled setting however, it is probably wise to ask one or more teaching assistants to be present to moderate chat. To this end:
- Make them a moderator by executing the command `/mod <username>` in chat with `<username>` being the username of your TA (without the angular brackets).
- The TA should now have a screen similar to this 
- With the mod abilities you can enable "mod icons" in the settings menu. With this 3 buttons appear next to each chat message: ban user, give user a timeout, remove message.
