• Twitch has announced an upcoming feature for creators that will allow them to ban users from watching streams.
• The feature was mentioned during a Patch Notes community stream, and is expected to be available starting next month.
• This is reportedly a feature that creators have been wanting for many years now.

For Twitch content creators, a highly requested feature is set to be added to the platform starting next month. This as they will be able to ban users from watching streams from September onwards.

The feature was detailed during a Patch Notes community event streamed earlier this week.

“We’ve gotten a lot of feedback over the years, to be honest, that people want their channel bans to do more,” noted Twitch senior product manager Trevor Fisher during the aforementioned Patch Notes stream.

As the format currently stands, creators are able to ban viewers from their chat channel, but next month they can be instantly blocked and removed from the stream. It is worth pointing out, however, that this will stop them from watching live streams, but not from accessing VODs or other clips on the platform.

“At the time being it won’t stop them from viewing VODs or clips, but that is something we also want to include as part of this functionality… in a future update,” added Fisher.

“This is something where we’ve kind of had to make a lot of incremental progress,” he continued.

While viewer statistics are a critical metric for Twitch streamers, this new feature comes at a time when harassment on the platform has become a growing problem.

This new ban users feature may not stop harassment on Twitch, but it will certainly give creators the ability to have more control, and perhaps some peace of mind too.