Serial harassers on Twitch are about to find it a lot harder to fling vitriol at streamers.

This is thanks to a new safety tool Twitch is rolling out. According to a report from Engadget the tool will allow streamers to share their list of banned users with other streamers so they can take pre-emptive action.

The tool is dubbed Shared Ban Info and builds off of the Suspicious User Controls system Twitch released in December. That system uses machine learning to identify users who may be trying to evade bans with new accounts.

From Engadget’s report streamers will have to request the ban list from another creator. Creators can connect up to 30 ban lists which is substantial and hopefully helps those in marginalised communities dodge hatred online.

Streamers will also have the option to decide which functions accounts that are banned by others have in their own chat. There are options to flag every message a user sends for review or those users can simply be banned from chat outright. Of course, streamers can give these users the green light to chat without restriction as well.

Perhaps more interesting is talk of the ability to allow streamers to decide who raids them. Raiding on Twitch is when one streamer hosts another at the end of their stream. It’s a nice way to push viewers to a smaller or similar streamer but it has been abused through hate raids in the past.

“Our safety work is never done, and we understand this feature alone is not a universal fix. That’s why we’re continually adding and expanding upon the tools in our suite of safety features,” Twitch wrote in a post.

You can read more about Shared Ban Info here.

As for how this has been received by the community, the outlook is positive. A tweet announcing the feature is littered with responses praising Twitch which makes for a nice, albeit strange change of pace.

It’s good to see Twitch taking the safety of its streamers so seriously and we hope this continues.