How Do Alert Box Variations Work?

As a live streamer, receiving tips or new subscribers coming in can have an enormous impact on your live stream. When these events occur, you probably feel super excited and want to share your gratitude with your audience—that’s where alerts come in. 

In addition to simply adding alerts for exciting events that happen while on stream, you can add variations for alerts to make certain events stand out more than others, such as receiving a huge tip, special subscriber milestones, or making a branded merch sale. In this blog, we’ll walk you through adding variation alerts via your Streamlabs Dashboard. 

Adding an Alert Box Widget To Your Live Stream

Before you can add alert variations to your live stream, you must add an Alert Box widget. Widgets are elements you can add to your stream to help you interact and engage with your community. 

How you add an alert box widget to your stream will depend on whether you're using Streamlabs Desktop, the Streamlabs for OBS plugin, or another live streaming software. To learn more, check out our Streamlabs alert settings guide.

What Are Alert Variations?

Alert Variations allow you to play different alerts based on a viewer's action meeting specific pre-set conditions. The types of variations you can create depend on the platform, as each has a unique set of conditions that can be applied for each alert type. 

For example, you can play a different alert when a viewer sends you a $1 tip vs. when someone sends a $10 tip. Streamers also commonly use variations for specific Twitch Subscriber or Youtube Member milestones such as one year subscribed. Below are some of the conditions that can be applied for alert variations on Twitch, YouTube and Tips.

Twitch

Follows

• Randomly (replaces default alert at random)
  

Subscriptions 

Please note that Twitch Subscription alerts also have sub-conditions—Anonymous Gift Sub, Community Gift Subs, and Anonymous Community gift sub). All of these can have the conditions below applied for alert variations.

• Randomly
• Months subscribed is at least <months>
• Months subscribed is exactly <months>
• When subscription is a gift
• Streak shared with chat and months subscribed in a streak is at least <months>
• Subscription tier is <tier>
• Subscription is Prime Gaming
• User gifted at least <amount> subs at once
• When an anonymous user gifts at least <amount> subs at once
• When user commits to continue their gift subscription
• When an anonymous user gifts a subscription
• When user extends their subscription using sub tokens
• When a subscription is an upgrade from a Prime Gaming sub

Bits 

Bits also have sub-conditions (e.g., bits used at least 5000), all of which can have the conditions below applied for alert variations.

• Randomly
• Bits used is at least <amount>
• Bits used is exactly <amount>

Raids

• Randomly
• Raid party size is at least <raiders>

YouTube

Subscribers

• Randomly

Members 

• Randomly
• Months as member is at least <months>
• Membership level is at least <level>
• Membership level name is <name>
• Membership gift amount is <amount>
• User gifted at least <amount> members at once
• Membership gift level is <levelname>

Super Chats

• Randomly
• Super Chat amount is at least <amount>
• Super Chat amount is exactly <amount>

Tips

• Randomly
• Donation amount is at least <amount>
• Donation amount is exactly <amount>
• Donation amount is the largest this stream
• Donation is recurring

We also support variations for Trovo and Facebook, as well as all of our integration alert types. We recommend reviewing the variation options available for each platform to determine which ones would be most appropriate for your live stream.

How to Add Alert Variations in Streamlabs

Let’s say you would like a special alert to play when someone tips you $10 or more. Below are the steps you’d take to add variations to this specific type of event. However, you can follow the same process for any event type that you’d like.

Step 1: Navigate to the Alert Box Settings window on your Streamlabs Dashboard. Under Tips, click on + Add Variation.

Step 2: Next, Name your new variation in the window that appears. In this case, we’ll call it “Tips greater than $10.” Click Add when you’re done.

Step 3: Set the condition as “Donation amount is at least...” and enter $10 as the tip amount so that tips over $10 trigger a different alert.

Step 4: Lastly, customize your alert variation using the different settings options to make your variation stand out. P.S. You can preview all of your customizations in the right preview window while you are editing. Remember to click the Save Settings button when you’ve made all of your changes.

Managing Variations

Your alert variations are visible for a given event type in the left navigation when the main event  is selected. If you have many variations, you can scroll to view them all within the left navigation.

You can also easily manage your variations by clicking on the Manage Variations option. Here, you can easily view all of your variations, enable/disable and delete variations, or jump to different variations to edit them. 

Check out our Streamlabs Alerts guide to learn more about customizing alerts (including variations), from adding sounds to tweaking the layout of images and text, plus much more.

If you have any questions or comments, please let us know by contacting us. Remember to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.