How to Disable Text Chat and Voice Chat (Updated 2023)

Voice and Text Spam can be a massive problem in any game. Sadly TF2 is no exception to this (in my personal opinion and experience, TF2 has the worst spam for both compared to any multiplayer game out there). Thankfully however, there are solutions to this problem. Quite a few as a matter of fact, and this guide is here to showcase the many ways at muting players in this almost 14 year old game. Whether your motives are to stop seeing the obnoxious text spam that bots spew out every time they join a server, or just to mute some 10 year old who won't shut up (and probably shouldn't even be playing the game at all). I hope that every player can benefit from this guide in some way.

This guide will show you how to disable both the Text Chat and Voice Chat as well.

Enabling The Developer Console

Before we begin however, you need to make sure that your developer console is enabled

This section of this guide shows how to do it. (You can skip this section of the guide if you know how to enable it already)





First, Go to your Options Menu




Clicking the button, a window will open displaying various options



But the one your going to navigate to is the "Advanced" tab at the bottom of the window




And then another window will open but this time showing two options with two boxes
The box your going to click on is next to the words "ENABLE DEVELOPER CONSOLE" after clicking it the box with have a check mark




And then close all the option windows, you just successfully enabled the developer console!

Mute Method #1 - Advanced Options (Added in June 2020)

For this method, simply click on the Advanced Options button, it's next to the standard options menu.



The Enable Text and Voice chat options will be at the top of the Advanced Options Menu. There you will be able to disable the text and voice chat

Mute Method #2 - The Console (Part 1)

For this method, Open the console by pressing the tilde key (`) on your keyboard
It will open a massive window with a text bar at the bottom

For the purposes of this guide, your only going to be entering 2 commands into this text bar.
The first command is going to be "hud_saytext_time 0"




Once you type/paste this command in the console, Press Enter.
What this command is supposed to do is that it will prevent player messages in the text chat from being shown. This effect only applies to you and doesn't effect other players.



However if you want to get the chat back, Enter the same command but put a 12 instead of a 0.
0 is the default value for this command.

Mute Method #2 - The Console (Part 2)

Another command you can enter into the console is this command:

"voice_enable" 0 or 1



0 Disables the voice chat
1 Enables the voice chat



A thing to note about both of these commands is it might be possible to turn these commands into binds. From my experience, this doesn't seem to work. However feel free to experiment with binds to see if it works or not.

Mute Method #3 - Options Menu 2: Electric Boogaloo (Voice Chat Only)

For this method, we're going back into the standard options menu



This time however we are going to click on the 'Voice' section of the options menu.



Now all you need to do is click on the "Enable Voice in This Game" box to turn off the voice chat.

Mute Option #4 - Mute Players Button (In-Game Only)

As some people may know, TF2 has a built in mute system in the game already, but what some people may not know about it is.

You can also hide someone's text in the chat of the game.

In order to do this (you must be in a game for this btw, it only works when your in an actual game)
You must open the pause menu (by hitting the "esc" key) and navigate through out your menu and look for a button called "Mute Players" (It might look different depending if you're using a custom hud)
and once you click Mute Players, it will open this menu:







and all you have to do is simply click on the name of the person you want to mute and press the "Mute in-game voice" button to mute both their voice and text in the chat

Video Version

[Astolfo's Chair]

No more racist :)

[melincoli]

i had to use this to enable voice chat
yes i am that stupid

[mmiɿǫ]

Finally TF2 ain't chat game

[Seth Gold]

thanks man now i can not see children saying stupid stuff

[Carly Sortof]

I've been doing this kind shit because of bots and I think somehow muted myself, like i cannot see my own messages in chat or even things like dropped items in chat. I have gotten kicked by bots but not consistently that i should be worried about some kind of accidental punishment even

[Monster]

thx man i need this

[Tripper_Inkwell]

question, what does it mean when it says text/voice communication is not avalible for this account?

[denzy_]

is there any commands that control the "enable text/voice communication" in the advanced options?

everytime I set those to be disabled, restarting TF2 re-enables them and while hud_saytime_text 0 and voice_enable 0 are good enough, I'm missing out on server info that disabling "enable text/voice communication" allows to be seen (it only blocks chatter, not server messages or anything remotely sent to users by the server)

any help is appreciated
sorry for the comment necro

[Psycho]

thank you. i look at this guide whenever i play tf2 now, to get this command hud_saytext_time 0
i needed to disable chat so i could record tf2 gameplay. thank u

[Bastard Vein]

Best Guide Ever. No one like the community anyway.