Effi allows you to stream to multiple destinations at once, and Chat pulls in all of those incoming messages and then allows you to curate and display them to your live viewers — on all platforms. That means that your viewers watching on YouTube can see messages from viewers watching on Facebook, Twitch, etc. If you want to add a Chat element to your event, just follow along below to learn how.
Add Chat to your event
Select the scene you’d like to add Chat to from the bottom of your studio, then click the Elements icon on the right-hand side.
Choose “Chat" and select a style from the panel. Once you click it, you will notice a popup asking you to "Create a new chat" or "Use data from prior chat." I will explain this down below, for now, pick "Create new chat." The chat element will populate in your scene preview window
Unlike a lot of the other elements, each time you add a chat element to a scene it will ask you if you want to "Create a new chat" or "Use data from prior chat." Let's say you have an event with multiple scenes and you want to use multiple chat elements. You can choose to create one chat element and then choose "Use data from prior chat" which means every chat element in every scene will display the same messages. You can also choose to create several chat elements, and select which ones you'd like to use in which scenes from the dropdown. Maybe odd scenes get one chat and evens get the other.
Or you can create multiple different chat elements that all display different data. For example, let's say you want to have two different chat elements on the same scene. One for the general chat that display all the incoming messages and one that only displays messages using a special hashtag. In this case you wouldn't want to use prior data, you'd want to "Create a new chat."
That is all there is to adding Chat to your event. Now it is time to talk about chat settings.
Chat Settings
Your chat settings are where you will be able to choose how incoming messages are displayed and what is filtered.
Click "Settings" in the Chat Options menu on the right-hand side.
Let's take a closer look at all the available settings
Message display type: here you can choose whether you would like to display multiple messages at a time or just one message at a time.
Message selection: choose whether you want to display all incoming messages (except for the ones you hide but more on that soon) or select manually the messages you’d like displayed from the Audience Chat box. Regardless of whether you choose “display all” or “select manually” you will still be able to manually hide messages.
Remove messages after: choose the amount of time you’d like messages displayed for. Messages will disappear after the selected amount of time.
Profane and harassing words: use this toggle to filter out a pre-selected list of words. To see the list, click here.
Enter additional words to filter: add your own list of words you would like to filter or add additional words to the pre-selected list.
Hide URLs: will filter out all links from the chat.
Hide users: add usernames you would like to filter out of your chat.
💡if you’re looking for more hands-on curation, you might want to opt for the Chat Pro element.
Designing your Chat
Choose "Design" from the Chat Options menu on the right-hand side.
From fonts to backgrounds to colors, Effi offers you the ability to completely customize your chat element to make it match the look and feel of your broadcast.
That's it. You've officially added Chat to your event and you're ready to start displaying incoming messages to your audience. Continue reading from the articles below to learn more about the chat element.