What is a Twitch raid? Everything you need to know

If you’ve hung around Twitch long enough, you’ve probably seen a channel raid happen. However, what exactly is a Twitch raid?

Being a Twitch streamer, one of the hardest things to tackle is growing your channel. Twitch offers a few different options in your creator dashboard to help with that.

One of those options is called a channel raid, and if you’re looking to find out what exactly that is then you’ve come to the right place.

What is a raid?

A raid, also known as a channel raid, is a tool Twitch gives you to send your live viewers to another streamer’s channel.

Once the raid commences it will redirect everyone that was watching your stream, however, new viewers to your channel will still see your profile.

Twitch

The Twitch Raid button brings up this box, which gives you a visual representation of who you can raid.

How do raids work?

If you already know what a raid is, you may still be wondering how exactly to start one. There are actually two ways to start a raid on Twitch:

1. From your channel’s chat, type /raid followed by the channel name of who you want to send the raid to. For example, if you wanted to raid the Dexerto Twitch channel, you would type /raid dexerto into your chat.
2. Click the raid channel quick action from your channel dashboard. A box will pop up on your screen with an option to search, as well as the top of your following list. Once you find the user you want to raid, click on their name and then the ‘start raid’ button at the bottom of the pop-up box.

Once you perform either of these actions, a box will pop up on top of your channel chat. This box displays the number of participants in the raid as well as a countdown to the start of it.

After 10 seconds, or until everyone in your channel is ready, you will be able to click the purple ‘Raid Now’ button to redirect everyone from your channel to the new target channel.

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When a raid is received, a message in chat notifies everyone on the target channel about the raid and the number of participants in your raid.

How do I react to a Twitch raid?

If you’re a streamer and get raided while live, you might wonder how to react to someone’s kindness. Here are a few tips:

1. Thank the raider for choosing you. A raid isn’t just showing love to you, it’s trusted from the other streamer that you will respect their community just as much as they do!
2. Introduce yourself. Keep it short and sweet, give them an idea of who you are, what you play, and when you stream. If you’re lucky, you might see people return to your stream on their own!

Can you stop Twitch raids?

There are many reasons why you may want to disable raids from another streamer. Twitch has provided three options to moderate your raids, including limiting to people you follow, are friends with, are on the same stream team as, or block all raids completely.

Here’s how to access those options:

1. On Twitch.tv, click your profile image in the top right of the website.
2. After clicking ‘Creator Dashboard’ in the drop-down, click on the arrow beside ‘Settings’ on the left side of your dashboard.
3. Following step 2, you should see more options appear under ‘Settings.’ Click ‘Stream’
4. Scroll all the way to the bottom of stream settings, and you’ll see a box labeled ‘Raids.’ In that box, you’ll see the three options we listed above.

Can I moderate raid messages?

Often after receiving a raid, the streamer sending the raid will have a ‘raid message’ their chat repeatedly posts in your chat. If you feel like they’re spamming your channel, you can moderate that as well.

The streamer and mods will have the ability to do the following steps:

1. Click the settings button at the bottom of channel chat, beside the purple chat button.
2. Under channel modes, you will see four options to select:Emotes-Only: Emotes-only chat prevents anyone from posting anything other than emotes while enabled. Subscribers-Only: (requires Partner/Affiliate): In this mode, only your subscribers can post in the chat. Followers-Only: In this mode, only your followers can post in the chat. You can set the duration a person needs to be following your channel before they can post. Slow Mode: This mode requires users to wait a set amount of time (customizable by you) between sending messages. Subscribers can be exempted via your Partner/Affiliate settings.
3. Select one of these options depending on your needs.

Can I ban inappropriate raiders?

There is always the off-chance you get hit by a raider that is just looking to cause harm. Fortunately, Twitch has also provided the tool to ban specific raiders.

1. Click the settings button at the bottom of your channel chat to open your mod options.
2. Towards the bottom, you will see ‘Review Recent Raids’.
3. After clicking that option, you will be shown all recent raiders and will have the option to either report the account or ban them from ever raiding you again.

So, that’s all – everything you need to know about Twitch raids. Stick with Dexerto for more guides on streaming on the platform!