Twitch is stepping up its efforts to make the platform safer by rolling out Shared Ban Info, a new safety tool that enables streamers to share information with other streamers about users they have banned from their chats.
Shared Ban Info, which the streaming platform announced in a blog post on Thursday, is an update to the Ban Evasion Detection tool it rolled out in November. It operates as a network that helps content creators protect themselves and each other from harassment. The process is a two-way street. A streamer sends a request to another streamer — be it a partner, affiliate, or mutual follower — to share their ban list. Once they accept the request, the streamer who sent the request consents to have their ban info shared with that channel as well. Right now, a streamer can have 30 sharing relationships at most.
Our new Shared Ban Info feature rolling out today helps you easily share banned user information with trusted channels to help keep your community safe.
Learn more: https://t.co/zhvOMnj8Bn pic.twitter.com/wVKcIaVHU0
— Twitch (@Twitch) July 21, 2022
Once the Shared Ban Info connection has been established, the user that has been banned from their channels will automatically have their messages flagged, and they’ll either restrict or monitor that user, depending on their settings. The first chat message the monitored user sends will have a clear red border and give details about the channels they’re banned from, which will help content creators keep watch and restrict them from chatting if need be.
“Nothing’s more important than the safety of streamers and their communities,” Twitch says in the post. “Feeling comfortable expressing yourself is one of the things that makes Twitch, Twitch and that can only happen when people feel safe doing so.”
The Shared Ban Info may benefit marginalized streamers who have been experiencing a rash of hate raids in recent months, especially Black and LGBTQ+ streamers. Each community has asked Twitch to do better to protect them from harassment, and while the Ban Evasion Detection tool helps to keep track of users banned for harassment, the Shared Ban Info feature may help to enhance moderation and safety.
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”
It’s turning into a pretty good time to be a Monster Hunter fan who plays on a phone. Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Outlanders will launch on Android and iOS on October 29, giving the series a new mobile-first game just as Monster Hunter Rise is also preparing to make the jump to smartphones through Netflix.
Outlanders is being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group under license and supervision from Capcom. Unlike Rise, which appears to be the full console and PC game adapted for mobile, Outlanders is a free-to-play survival hunting game made specifically for phones.