Nightbot Commands: The Complete Setup Guide

Nightbot's Default Commands

These come switched on the moment Nightbot joins your channel. Most are moderator-only management tools rather than things you'd advertise to viewers, and every one of them can be renamed, restricted or disabled from the Commands page of the dashboard.

The one worth showing viewers is !commands, which returns a link to a public web page listing every custom command on your channel. Pin that link in a panel and you stop answering "what commands do you have?" for the rest of your streaming career.

How to Add a Custom Nightbot Command

There are two routes and they write to the same place. Chat is faster mid-stream; the dashboard gives you every option in one screen.

1. 1Sign in at nightbot.tv with the platform account you stream from, then use Join Channel so Nightbot enters your chat.
2. 2Give Nightbot moderator status in your channel — without it, links and longer messages get filtered before anyone sees them.
3. 3Open Commands → Custom in the dashboard and choose Add Command.
4. 4Set the Command field to your trigger, including the exclamation mark, for example !discord.
5. 5Write the Message — the exact line Nightbot will post. Keep it to one line so it doesn't dominate chat or your overlay.
6. 6Pick a User Level: Everyone for viewer-facing commands, Moderator for anything that changes channel state.
7. 7Set a Cooldown in seconds. Thirty is a good default for informational commands.
8. 8Add an Alias if you want a second trigger to fire the same response, then save and test it in your own chat.

Nightbot must be modded in your channel to post links or long messages reliably. If it joins but never replies, that's almost always the reason.

Adding Commands From Chat

The chat syntax is quicker once you know it, and it's how most streamers add commands live while someone is asking a question. Every one of these is moderator-level by default.

A worked example: typing !addcom -cd=30 !discord Come hang out with us: discord.gg/yourinvite creates a !discord command with a 30-second cooldown. Change the wording later with !editcom !discord …, and remove it with !delcom !discord. If you'd rather see the finished wording before you commit, our !discord command guide has copy-ready responses.

Nightbot Variables: Making Commands Dynamic

A static response is fine for a Discord link. Variables are what turn a command into something that reacts to who typed it, what they typed and what's happening on your stream. Nightbot writes them as $(name).

Two of these do most of the heavy lifting. $(touser) is how interaction commands work: it returns the name the viewer typed after the trigger, and falls back to the viewer's own name if they typed nothing — which is exactly the behaviour you want for !hug and its variants. $(urlfetch) is how Nightbot does anything it can't do natively: it calls an external API and pastes the plain-text response into chat, which is the standard trick behind community !followage and !watchtime commands.

Worth knowing before you lean on it: a $(urlfetch) command is only as reliable as the third-party API behind it. Free community APIs go down, get rate-limited or quietly disappear, and when they do your command starts posting error text to chat. If a command matters to your channel, prefer a bot that computes the value itself over one that borrows it.

Cooldowns, User Levels and Aliases

Three settings decide whether your commands feel useful or feel like spam. All three sit on the same Add/Edit Command screen.

Nightbot's cooldown is channel-wide rather than per-user: once anyone fires !uptime, nobody can fire it again until the timer clears. That's a blunt instrument, but it does stop the "five people spam the same command" problem that ruins a chat overlay during a busy moment. Thirty seconds is a sensible starting point for informational commands and ninety for anything fun.

Nightbot Timers: Commands That Fire Themselves

A timer posts a message on a schedule without anyone typing anything — your socials, your Discord, the fact that you're doing a giveaway at the top of the hour. Nightbot gates them behind two conditions so they can't talk to an empty room.

The chat-lines threshold is the setting people skip and then regret. It tells Nightbot to only post if that many messages have gone by since the last timer fired, which means a quiet stream doesn't end up with your bot talking to itself. Set it to at least five and your timers will look like they're responding to an active chat rather than running on a clock.

A neat trick: point a timer at an existing command by using the alias field, so your !socials wording lives in exactly one place. Change the command, and the timer's message changes with it. Our !socials command guide covers how to format a multi-link response so it doesn't get truncated.

Where Nightbot Stops: The Kick Gap

Nightbot is genuinely good at what it does, and for a single-platform Twitch streamer it may be all you ever need. The honest limits are these.

• No Kick support — Nightbot covers Twitch and YouTube Live, so a Kick simulcast is left without a bot.
• Cooldowns are channel-wide rather than per-user, so you can't let each viewer run a fun command once a minute.
• Anything Nightbot can't calculate itself needs $(urlfetch) and a third-party API, which is a dependency you don't control.
• It's a chat bot only — no overlays, no clipping, no multistreaming, and no conversational AI to fill a quiet room.
• Command lists live per platform, so a Twitch list and a YouTube list are maintained separately even inside Nightbot.

The Kick gap is the one that bites hardest in 2026. If you simulcast to Twitch and Kick, Nightbot covers half your audience — the Kick half types !discord and gets silence. There's no configuration that fixes it, because the platform simply isn't supported.

Nightbot vs StreamUps Commands

StreamUps runs custom !commands too, so it's a fair comparison rather than an apples-to-oranges one. Here's where each is stronger.

The short version: Nightbot wins on moderation depth and a decade of community-written command recipes. StreamUps wins on platform coverage — one command list that answers on Twitch, YouTube Live and Kick at once — and on everything that isn't a command, since the same account also handles AI chat, merged chat overlays and multistreaming. Nothing stops you running both in the same chat, and plenty of streamers do exactly that.

If you're weighing up a switch rather than a supplement, the full breakdown lives on our Nightbot alternative page, and you can browse the whole chat commands library to see what a finished command list looks like.

Commands Worth Adding First

If you're starting from an empty command list, these five earn their place on almost every channel — each one links to a full setup guide with copy-ready responses for Nightbot and beyond.

Nightbot Commands FAQ