Moderating a broadcast chat that runs all night

16 Jul 2026 · 5 min read

The video loops safely. The chat does not.

The whole appeal of a hosted 24/7 broadcast is that the video takes care of itself. It is pre-recorded, it loops, it does not say anything it shouldn't. Chat is a different animal. It is live text from strangers, attached to your store page, running for as many hours as the broadcast itself. A store page is a storefront. Anyone who lands on it while you are offline, at a launch, or asleep at 4am can type into that chat, and whatever they type sits there until someone deals with it.

Valve documents a real set of moderation tools for this in its Broadcast Moderation and Adding Moderators guide. The tools work. The problem is timing: most developers only look them up after something has already gone wrong in the chat, not before the broadcast starts. For a stream that runs unattended for days, that is the wrong order.

Why chat moderation here is cleanup, not crowd control

Most people's mental model of chat moderation comes from live streaming: a presenter is on camera, sees something bad said, and reacts within seconds. That model doesn't apply to a looped Steam store broadcast, and it's worth being explicit about why.

First, there's no presenter. The video is a loop. Nobody is watching the feed and reacting to chat in real time, because nobody is meant to be - that's the entire point of running it unattended. So there is no one on the other end of the video to provoke or answer the chat in the moment.

That reframes the whole task. Moderating a 24/7 loop's chat is not live crowd control - it's asynchronous cleanup. Someone checks in periodically, removes what shouldn't be there, mutes who needs muting, and moves on. Nobody is going to catch a message the instant it's posted, and Valve's tools aren't built around that expectation either: everything on the list - removing messages, muting, adding moderators - is something you do after the fact, not a live-intervention control. Understanding that up front saves you from over-designing a moderation plan around round-the-clock live watching that the format was never going to support.

What actually shows up in an unattended chat

A chat attached to a store page around the clock, with no presenter, is open to spam and abuse at any hour. This article sticks to the tools Valve documents.

If spam crosses into behavior that violates Steam's broader community standards, that's a separate question from moderation mechanics - see what Steam's broadcast rules actually require for that side of it.

What a moderator can actually do

Valve's tools cover the basics you'd expect, and nothing more exotic. A moderator can select "Remove this user's messages" to clear what someone has already posted, and can mute an account with three levels of severity: "Mute user for 12 hours", "Mute user for a week", or "Mute user permanently", plus "Unmute" to reverse any of them. The same menu has "Make this user a Moderator" and "Remove Moderator status for user", but Valve notes that "users who have been promoted to moderator status cannot promote other users to moderator."

None of this requires a moderator to be glued to the chat window at the moment something happens, but it does require someone to have moderator status already. That status has to exist before the trouble does, which is really the whole point of setting this up ahead of time rather than reacting to it. For a repeat offender, the permanent mute and "remove this user's messages" options do most of the work: this is a cleanup toolkit, not a real-time gate.

Going public is the moment the chat becomes a storefront

There's a visibility detail that's easy to overlook and that changes when any of this actually matters: only Public broadcasts appear on your Steam store page. A broadcast set to friends-only has no store-page audience, and therefore effectively no chat exposure to the general public - the handful of people who can see it are people you already know.

That means the risk window isn't "whenever the stream is running." It's specifically the moment you flip visibility to Public. That's when the chat stops being a private conversation among friends and starts being a public surface attached to a page anyone browsing Steam can land on - which is exactly the scenario the rest of this article is about. If moderators aren't appointed before that switch happens, they're not appointed for the part of the broadcast that actually needed them.

Appoint moderators before you go live, not during

Valve gives you two ways to add a moderator. You can right-click any account inside the broadcast chat while it's live and select the option to make them a moderator. That works, but it means the account has to be present in your chat at that moment, which is not something you control on a broadcast that runs while you're not watching.

The better option for an unattended stream is the second one: elevate friends to moderator status directly from your Steam friends list. Do this and the access persists across every future broadcast from that account, not just the one running right now. Set it up once, before the stream starts, for whoever you trust to handle the chat, and it's already in place the next time you go live, whether that's a routine week or a Next Fest broadcast where traffic spikes hard and the switch to Public matters most.

Moderators aren't limited to a single screen either. Valve lets them act from the store page broadcast chat itself, from the dedicated broadcast page, and from a chat-only view window. That last one is useful for exactly the kind of periodic check-in this format calls for - a moderator doesn't need the full broadcast page open just to glance at chat and clear anything that's piled up.

Mods can't make more mods - plan the headcount yourself

There's one limitation in Valve's documentation that trips people up, and it's worth stating plainly: users who have been promoted to moderator status cannot promote other users to moderator. Only the original broadcaster can hand out moderator status. A moderator can remove, mute, and unmute all they like, but they cannot deputize anyone else if the chat gets busier than expected.

In practice, that means the size of your moderation team is a decision you make once, ahead of time, not something that scales itself up mid-event. If one moderator isn't enough for a launch day or a festival week, the fix isn't "ask a mod to add a mod" - because that option doesn't exist. The fix is going through your own friends list beforehand and appointing everyone you'll plausibly need before the broadcast starts, not partway through it.

Where a moderator works: three ways into the chat

A moderator has to be signed in as their own Steam account, and Valve's moderation guide lists three places to reach your chat. In each, clicking a line of chat opens the moderation tools.

Your store page. Click "Show Chat" under the broadcast. Handy for a quick look, but it shares the screen with the store page.

Your broadcast page. From the broadcast on your store page, click "View broadcast page".

The chat-only window. Best for a moderator on shift: the chat in its own window. Open steamcommunity.com/broadcast/chatonly/ followed by the broadcaster's 64-bit Steam ID, or, as the broadcaster, click "Broadcast Chat" on steamcommunity.com/broadcast/upload. To find the 64-bit ID, visit steamcommunity.com/broadcast/moderators and it is added to the end of the URL. In this view, the moderation menu sits behind the arrow on the right of each line.

To see who your moderators are, open steamcommunity.com/broadcast/moderators/ followed by the broadcaster's Steam ID. It lists current moderators and the users who have had action taken against them.

Running several broadcasts multiplies the chats, not just the video

It's easy to think of moderation as a one-time setup task you handle once and forget. That holds for a single title. It stops holding the moment you're running broadcasts for more than one game in parallel, because each store page carries its own broadcast and its own chat. Moderator status is tied to the broadcasting account: Valve says a moderator picked from your friends list can "moderate any broadcast of yours", so if different accounts broadcast different titles, each account appoints its own.

So a publisher or studio running several titles at once isn't looking at one chat to keep an eye on, they're looking at as many chats as they have public broadcasts running. The friends-list approach still helps here, since a moderator's access follows the broadcasting account across all its broadcasts, but each broadcasting account has to grant it. Worth factoring in before you scale from one store page to several: the moderation workload scales with the number of public broadcasts, not with how much video you're looping.

Check the moderation dashboard after, too

Setting up moderators solves the "while it's happening" problem. There's also an "after it happened" problem: you weren't watching, so how do you know what your moderators actually did, or whether anything needed doing that didn't get done? Valve covers this too. From the broadcast upload page, there's a "Moderation Dashboard" where the broadcaster can review who currently holds moderator status and see the history of moderation actions taken.

Make that dashboard a habit, not a one-off. Check it the morning after a big overnight stretch, or right after an event like a Next Fest broadcast ends. It shows the moderation history, so you can see what was done while you were away. It tells you whether your moderator list actually did anything, whether it's still the right list of people, and whether it's time to add someone before the next long run rather than during it.