The first feature that I’d like to see is the ability for moderators to edit their own and other users’ messages after they’ve been sent. There have been a lot of times where I want to run a utility chat bot on a large Twitch channel, but the inability to edit messages means that I would have to add a new line to chat for what I’m trying to achieve. For example, I made a bot that would automatically translate any non-english messages to english with the Google Translate API. If I had the ability to edit messages though, I could automatically edit any foreign message to be automatically translated to the default language of the channel instead of effectively doubling the number of messages when translating.
Another neat implementation of this feature would be the ability to create more interactive bots. Imagine that you have a monster for the chat to fight, where the initial message shows its health with a health bar. When each person damages the monster, it could edit the health bar to display the new health, essentially creating an animated experience. There is also a bot that runs in a channel I moderate for, Flosd, that has a slots feature where you type !slots and it displays three random emotes. If we could edit messages, we would be able to create an animated slots system using a similar method to the one above.
It could also be used to filter out any unwanted spam such as links or words that are unwanted without requiring them to fully remove and time out the user that posted it. Often times a user will post a link in chat with the streamer’s permission only to be timed out due to not having the !permit command run on them. There was also a time where I was having a discussion with a user, and my chat message ended up being fairly long, resulting in getting timed out automatically for 10 minutes.
The second feature request is similar to the first. It’d be nice to have the ability to pre-screen any messages that are sent to the chat. Meaning, we can see what a user is trying to send, then decide whether or not to let it appear in chat. If we were able to do this, we could stop spam bots before they even have a chance to post, which would stop any disruption in chat. We could also filter out any copy-pastas without having a slew of messages taking up a large portion of the chat. Overall it would be a really useful utility to have when moderating a chat or creating automated systems to do so.