Extensions Guidelines Clarification on 7.2

Hello all,

I’ve been playing with a few ideas for extensions and I’ve been reading the Dev Guidelines on what’s allowed and what’s not allowed. There is one point that is particularly confusing to me and I was hoping someone here could provide some clarity.

Section 7.2 from (https://dev.twitch.tv/docs/extensions/guidelines-and-policies/) reads:

“Extensions must provide broadcasters with the ability to review, and reject or approve any image or other audio-visual user content that has been submitted through an Extension on their channel.”

Does this mean that a broadcaster (or their moderators) must explicitly approve content submitted through an Extension on their channel before it can be displayed to other viewers, either on the stream or in the Extension? Or merely that the broadcaster (or their moderators) must be able to remove content submitted through the Extension?

The simplest example I can think of here is in combination with 6.1.4, which states that Bits may be used, “For voting activities in your Extension, such as allowing viewers to use Bits to show support for a desired outcome made available through a poll or voting mechanic.” If a streamer asks viewers, “What champion and build should I do for the next game?” (League of Legends or Dota, for example), are viewers allowed to write a message that is then displayed in the extension where viewers can vote for their preferred outcome?

As an explicit example: a streamer poses the above question, and then Viewer A types, “Tank Veigar or Position 5 Bloodseeker” and votes 1000 Bits. Is that text allowed to be immediately added to the poll for Viewers B and C to see and vote on with Bits? Or does the text need to be approved by the streamer before it can be shown in the extension’s poll?

With how “Submit” and “Publish” are defined in the lead-in paragraph of 7, I can see it going either way, so I’m fairly confused.

Thanks in advance, I hope you are all staying safe during the virus!

Cheers,

Michael

7.2 talks about images and audio-visual content.

Submitted text shown in an extension is neither of these things*

UNLESS * it’s shown on stream via an Browser Source.

In My opinion: everything should be user moderatorable and ran past the auto mod API endpoint first before accepted for submission. So you should provide the ability for moderators (and above) to remove user submitted content, irrespective of this rule.

Automod Endpoint:

You don’t want someone to put “follow my channel < link >” for example and have no way to easily remove that.

I think the intent of this rule is to protect what appears on stream/recorded to video as apposed to what is sent to and shown in the same extension. But you should still provide the tooling.

Disclaimer: not Staff or review team, this is all my interpretation and how I’ve implemented the rules. Given most of mine don’t use user submitted content. And where they do the content in question existed prior to the rules and is moderated before it’s live.

See also, these uservoices for making it easier to moderate such content

Summary: the use case you describe should be ok, but you still need the power to moderate the content in the extension in case someone tries to submit something they shouldn’t or violates the channel rules that the channel installing the extension has.

1 Like

Thank you for the response!

It does seem I was misreading the “audio-visual” component, people in my circle often use the “-” as an either/or and not in the proper grammatical sense, so thank you for pointing that out.

I do see what you mean regarding the importance of making content easily removable (and Automod integration) by channel mods and the streamer, so I’ll factor that in when doing design and planning.

I suppose it’s not a huge loss if the use case I described isn’t okay, since there are other ways of getting the same result that should fix whatever issue Twitch had with the Extension, they just take more work.

Anyway, thanks again and I hope you have a wonderful year!