Streamer Accidentally Deletes All His Followers While Trying To Purge Bots

Bots are still a big problem on Twitch, even in 2022. No streamer wants to be plagued by an onslaught of bot accounts either spamming nonsense in their chat, or clogging up their follower list. Luckily, there are ways to deal with bots and purge them from your channel, which is great, so long as you do it properly.

The key word here is “properly”, and I’m sure you know from the headline exactly where this is going. Streamer Evan Gao had (and to be fair, is still having) a nightmare when he accidentally blocked every single one of his followers, apart from the bot accounts he was trying to remove. Whoops.

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After being targeted by a flurry of bot followers, Gao was attempting to use a follower remover tool to purge them, and didn’t realise that he hadn’t quite read the instructions properly until everything went horribly wrong. He accidentally blocked over 6000 real followers, and wasn’t even aware until some of his chat pointed it out.

“Dude! Are you kidding me? Is there a way to undo that? Oh, dude. Nooo, I didn’t click apply filters,” he said, as he realised what had happened. 

“You can remove followers, and you can add a filter for those who followed between a certain time. So I selected today’s date, I selected a few minutes before the bot following happened, I selected a few minutes after it happened, and then I clicked ‘remove all followers listed below’,” he explained, after understanding what went wrong. “I did not click on this funny little button, that says ‘apply filters’. And so instead of blocking every single person who followed in that short five minute window, I blocked every single person since the existence of my channel. Leaving me with 232 followers, all of whom were bots.”

As of now, the streamer has regained around 400 followers, so he has a long way to go until he gets anywhere near the number he had before. As the clip of his accidental purge is rapidly growing in popularity, he could even end up getting more than he ever had, which would be a positive to come out of it. Rest assured he’ll remember to click that “apply filters” button next time, anyway.