Kick Banned Words & Chat Filter Settings (2026 Streamer Guide)

Chat moderation on Kick is one of those things streamers don't think about until they need it — which is usually when a raid of trolls drops 200 slurs in 10 seconds. Setting up your chat filters before you need them saves you from awkward live moments. Here's the complete Kick moderation setup for 2026.

Kick's Built-In Chat Moderation Tools

Kick provides several moderation layers out of the box:

1. Banned Words List

You can create a custom list of banned words and phrases. Any message containing a banned word is automatically blocked before it appears in chat.

How to set it up:

1. Go to Dashboard → Channel → Moderation
2. Navigate to Banned Words
3. Add words/phrases, one per line
4. Save

Tips for effective banned words lists:

• Ban the obvious slurs and hate speech — the words you never want appearing in your chat under any circumstances
• Ban common spam phrases — "follow my channel", "check out my stream", "free V-bucks"
• Ban competitor promotion — "come watch [other streamer]"
• Use partial matches carefully — banning "ass" also blocks "class," "assistant," "password." Consider adding the word with spaces: " ass " to reduce false positives
• Update regularly — trolls evolve their language; review your list monthly

2. AutoMod

Kick's AutoMod automatically detects and holds messages containing:

• Hate speech and discriminatory language
• Sexual content and explicit language
• Aggressive/threatening language
• Spam patterns (repeated characters, excessive caps)

AutoMod has adjustable sensitivity levels:

Level	What Gets Caught	Good For
Off	Nothing auto-caught	"Anything goes" channels
Low	Obvious slurs, extreme content	Most gaming channels
Medium	Moderate profanity, borderline content	Mixed-audience channels
High	Most profanity, suggestive content	Family-friendly channels

Recommendation for most streamers: Low or Medium. High catches too many legitimate messages and frustrates real chatters.

3. Slow Mode

Limits how often each user can send a message:

• Off: No limit
• 3 seconds: Light throttle
• 5 seconds: Moderate
• 10 seconds: Heavy
• 30 seconds: Emergency mode

Use slow mode when:

• You have 200+ active chatters and chat is moving too fast to read
• Trolls are spam-flooding your chat
• You want more thoughtful conversation and less one-word spam

Don't use slow mode when:

• You have under 50 active chatters (kills conversation momentum)
• Chat is already slow (makes it look dead)

4. Sub-Only Chat Mode

Restricts chat to subscribers only. Non-subscribers can still watch but can't type.

When to use it:

• During major troll raids
• For special subscriber-only events
• When you want to incentivize subs

When NOT to use it:

• When growing your channel (new viewers can't engage = can't convert to followers)
• Most regular streams (kills organic chat growth)
• When you have fewer than 100 subs (chat will be dead)

5. Follower-Only Chat Mode

Only users who follow the channel can chat. Non-followers must follow first.

This is a good middle ground between open chat and sub-only:

• Blocks drive-by trolls (who won't follow to troll)
• Lets all real viewers chat (follow is free)
• Minor friction point (some casual viewers won't follow just to chat)

Recommendation: Enable follower-only after your first troll incident. Keep it off during early growth when you want zero friction.

6. Account Age Requirement

Require chatters to have a Kick account older than X days. Blocks freshly-created throwaway troll accounts.

Common settings:

• 1 day: Blocks same-session throwaway accounts
• 7 days: Blocks casual trolls
• 30 days: Strict — also blocks legitimate new viewers

Recommendation: 1-7 days is the sweet spot. 30 days is too aggressive unless you're actively being targeted.

Building Your Banned Words List

Starter Template

Here's a starter list covering the most common categories (you'll want to customize for your community):

Hate speech: The standard racial, ethnic, homophobic, and transphobic slurs. I won't list them here but you know which words need to be on this list. Cover common misspellings and l33tspeak variants (replacing letters with numbers).

Spam/scam phrases:

• buy followers
• free vbucks
• free robux
• check out my
• follow my channel
• @everyone
• discord.gg (if you want to block external Discord links)
• bit.ly (blocks URL shorteners used in scams)

Self-promotion:

• come watch
• check out my stream
• live now at
• streaming on

Platform-specific:

• viewer bot (ironic, but you don't want chatters accusing you of botting in your own chat)
• fake viewers
• viewbot
• botting

Advanced: Regex-Like Patterns

Kick's banned words support wildcard matching in some cases. Test patterns before relying on them. Common patterns:

• Adding spaces around short words to avoid false positives
• Including common letter substitutions (0 for o, 1 for i, 3 for e)
• Multiple variants of the same word with different capitalizations

What NOT to Ban

Avoid banning:

• Common gaming terms that happen to contain banned substrings
• Your own emote names (if they contain filtered words)
• General profanity if your content is 18+ (let your audience be themselves)
• Criticism of your gameplay (banning "you suck" makes you look thin-skinned)

Appointing Moderators

Human moderators are essential once you're past 50 average concurrent:

When to Appoint Mods

• After your first troll incident (reactive)
• Once you hit 50+ average concurrent (proactive)
• When chat moves fast enough that you can't read everything while gaming

Who to Appoint

• Loyal regular viewers who are already present every stream
• People with moderate temperament (not trigger-happy banners)
• People in your timezone who watch your full stream
• NOT your friends who rarely watch — absent mods are useless mods

How Many Mods

Average Concurrent	Recommended Mods
50-100	2-3
100-500	3-5
500-2,000	5-10
2,000+	10+ or professional mod team

Mod Guidelines

Give your mods clear rules:

1. Warn first, timeout second, ban third (escalation)
2. Don't ban for disagreement or gameplay criticism
3. Ban immediately for hate speech, doxxing, or threats (no warning needed)
4. Timeout for spam (10-minute timeout, not permanent ban)
5. When in doubt, timeout and ask the streamer after

Handling Troll Raids

When 50-200 troll accounts flood your chat simultaneously:

1. Enable sub-only mode immediately (stops the flood)
2. Enable slow mode (30 seconds) as a secondary throttle
3. Have mods mass-timeout/ban the flooding accounts
4. Don't react on stream — trolls want a reaction. Calmly say "dealing with some spam, one sec" and handle it
5. After the raid passes (usually 2-5 minutes), switch back to follower-only mode
6. Add any new slur variants from the raid to your banned words list
7. Consider enabling account-age requirement if raids repeat

Most troll raids are one-time events triggered by a larger streamer's community. They pass quickly if you don't feed them attention.

Chat Bots and Moderation

If you're using a chat bot to make your chat look active, your moderation settings need to accommodate the bot accounts:

• Bot accounts should NOT be on the banned words list (obviously)
• If you enable follower-only chat, bot accounts need to follow the channel first
• If you enable account-age requirements, bot accounts must meet the age threshold
• If you enable sub-only chat, bot accounts can't chat (they're not real subs)

ViewRaid's chat bot accounts are all mature accounts that follow your channel automatically, so follower-only and standard account-age requirements don't block them. Sub-only mode will block bot chatters — only enable sub-only during emergencies, not regular streams.

Third-Party Moderation Bots

Beyond Kick's built-in tools, some third-party moderation bots offer:

• Advanced link filtering (whitelist specific domains)
• Custom command responses (!rules, !socials, !discord)
• Message logging for review
• Automated welcome messages for new followers
• Spam detection with ML-based pattern recognition

The third-party bot ecosystem for Kick is smaller than Twitch's but growing. Check what's available in the Kick developer community.

Bottom Line

Set up Kick chat moderation before you need it — not during a troll raid. Start with a solid banned words list, AutoMod on Low/Medium, and follower-only chat once you're past 50 average concurrent. Appoint 2-3 trusted mods early and give them clear escalation guidelines.

Good moderation creates a safe chat environment, which increases viewer retention, which increases follower conversion, which grows your channel. It's as much a growth tool as it is a defense tool.

Ready to grow the audience that makes moderation worth setting up? Try our free Kick viewer bot trial — 30 minutes, 25 viewers, no credit card. Get discovered first, then moderate the community that grows from it.