Unified Chat Dock

Unified chat dock

The Tandem Chat dock shows chat from every platform you enabled, newest at the bottom. Each line starts with a platform label (Twitch, Kick, YouTube), then the author in their chat color, then the message. A star marks the channel owner, a sword marks moderators.

Controls

• Status / filter row at the top: one checkbox per platform, showing its state:
  • off: chat for that platform is disabled in Settings.
  • idle: enabled but chat isn't running.
  • connecting, connected, reconnecting, error: hover for the reason (for example "Waiting for the stream to go live" or "YouTube API quota exhausted for today").
  • Untick a platform to hide its messages; ticking it again shows them.
• Start chat / Stop chat: start or stop all enabled platforms. By default chat starts by itself when OBS starts streaming and stops when it stops (Settings → Chat → "Start chat when OBS starts streaming").
• Clear: empties the dock and the history the overlay replays when it (re)connects. Messages already on an overlay stay until they fade or scroll away.
• Settings: platforms, channels, the YouTube key, timestamps, the message limit and the overlay.

Behaviour and limits

• Read-only: Tandem doesn't send chat messages.
• Messages deleted by moderators disappear from the dock and overlay; a ban or timeout removes that user's messages; a chat clear removes that platform's messages.
• The dock keeps the newest 500 messages (adjustable from 50 to 5000), so memory stays flat on long streams.
• Updates are drawn every 100 ms in batches, so a busy chat doesn't slow OBS down. If you scroll up to read, the dock stops auto-scrolling until you scroll back to the bottom.
• Emotes are shown as images: Twitch emotes (including subscriber emotes), Kick emotes, and 7TV, BetterTTV and FrankerFaceZ emotes. For the last three, Tandem loads the channel's emote sets and the global sets, the same ones viewers see with those browser extensions, so a word like catJAM shows as the emote. 7TV covers Twitch, Kick and YouTube channels; BetterTTV and FrankerFaceZ are Twitch-only. Turn the extension emotes off in Settings → Chat if you prefer. Animated emotes show their first frame in the dock and animate in the overlay.
• Each platform runs on its own connection and thread. If one platform fails, the others keep working.
• Reconnects use exponential backoff with jitter (1 second up to 1 minute) and only reset after a connection has been healthy for 30 seconds, so a flaky network doesn't cause a reconnect storm. Permanent problems (invalid channel, invalid API key, quota exhausted, chat ended) stop with an error instead of retrying.
• Chat history from before Tandem connected isn't loaded.