The popular streaming website Twitch unveiled that it is expanding some of the social features that will make it easier for users to interact with others on its website as well as provide protections for streamers.

The changes, revealed during the newest Twitch Patch Notes stream, included the new Guest Star feature, a better tagging system, and sharable ban lists.

Guest Star will allow streamers to bring up to five other streamers on Twitch onto their channel as guests – exactly what the new feature sounds like.

“Guest Star is a tool that makes it easy, safe and fun for creators to bring guests — whether it’s other creators or viewers — on stream,” said Senior Product Manager Chris Miles.

The idea behind Guest Star is that it will allow streamers to more readily produce podcasts, live shows, and other talk entertainment venues on Twitch without the need for specialized studio software on their PCs. This will allow multiple people running streams through Twitch to simply have themselves hosted into one channel and go.

In the past, Twitch streamers would use third-party tools to bring guests to their stream and the objective is to allow them to do it through the platform instead.

A single host can bring on up to five guests, making a total of six people on a channel at once.

Twitch is also updating its tag system, which presently only allows users to choose five tags from a preset list. The new system will allow users to set custom tags and expands the list to 10.

It will also add a moderation system that will check the use of tags in order to prevent tag abuse by streamers and allow users to report abusive tags.

One other feature that will make the lives of streamers a bit more comfortable in the future is the ability to share ban lists. With Share Bans, different Twitch streamers could share their ban lists and make it difficult for serial harassers and other misbehaving users to hop between streams and maintain aggressive campaigns – it would also help in curbing misbehaving bots that pervade the platform.

This would be extremely helpful for networks of streamers who work closely together and have tight-knit communities where harassers and bots tend to flow freely between them. As it’s not uncommon for an individual who was banned from one community to simply move over to another to continue their bad behavior only to need to be uprooted from that one as well.

It would be excellent as well for marginalized and minority communities on Twitch who already share ban information with one another as they are common targets for bad behavior.

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