Tutorial
Set up name patterns
Watch names and handles for the patterns you choose. A match tells you; it never holds and never bans.
Drawn from the product as it works today. The pictures are sketches, not screenshots.
-
Step one
Where patterns live
Name patterns sit in Settings, in a panel of their own. Adding and deleting them belongs to the channel owner; the rest of the team can see the list, the hit counts and the last hit, but not the controls.
-
Step two
Write the pattern
A pattern is a real regular expression, so tr[o0]ll|h8er catches the zero and the eight because you wrote them in; nothing guesses look-alike spellings for you. You choose what it reads: the display name, the handle, or both. A pattern that cannot compile is refused when you save it, with the reason, rather than saved broken.
-
Step three
What it watches
Patterns run on comments as they arrive, from the moment the pattern exists; adding one does not re-scan your archive. Each name is tried as written and again normalised, so capitals, compatibility characters and invisible characters do not slip past. Viewers you have marked trusted are skipped: patterns stop matching them, and only patterns.
-
Step four
A match tells you, and only tells you
A hit is recorded and you are told; that is the whole act. Nothing is held, nobody is banned, and the comment is treated like any other. A match on an account this tray has never seen before rings at once; a match on a known account rides the daily digest instead. And a matching name is only ever a matching name: it never proves two accounts are one person.
-
Step five
Reading a hit
The notification lands on the comment itself, where the record says a name you are watching matched. The viewer's own page gathers the rest: their name-pattern hits, and every name and handle the tray has seen them use, so an observed rename does not lose the history attached to that account.
-
Step six
Acting stays yours
From the comment card you can hold the comment yourself; from the viewer's page you can change their standing; either is your decision, made by you and recorded as yours, never a consequence the pattern triggered. Deleting a pattern removes it and its recorded hits.