Find an older comment
Live has the comments the tray has seen since you connected it. Archive has the older ones YouTube could still give it.
Feature
Comment archive
Keep your own record of the comments your tray has seen and what was done about them.
YouTube can stop showing a comment later, and that is when the archive is useful. It is never complete, though. The tray can't fetch comments that were gone before it first looked. What it stores is the wording it last saw, not a copy that is kept continuously up to date. And when an ordinary comment is no longer available on YouTube, the tray can remove its stored text too.
CommentExample
Comment
In contextAssessmentTeach this assessmentModerate this commentThe record
"Anyone who builds it this way has never held a chisel."
Hold
Would hold this comment. Contempt aimed at the creator rather than the work.
Assessment
very sure
Insults or mocks youaimed at you
The record
Every write attempted
We first saw it · The tray assessed it · We suggested a moderation action
Outcomes
What you can do with it
See what the tray still has after a ban
After you ban someone, YouTube's Comments page may stop listing their comments. The tray keeps the ban and whatever it had recorded, for as long as that record is kept. It isn't a complete YouTube history.
Go from the comment to the person
From an archived comment, open the viewer who wrote it: the names they've used, their standing and what's been done about them.
The path
How it works
Connect the channel
The tray starts keeping comments YouTube makes available after you connect it.
Let older comments arrive
Older comments that YouTube still returns are kept for reference only. The tray doesn't assess them, alert you about them or moderate them.
Open Archive
Browse the older comments, and open a comment or a viewer when you need the detail.
Know where the record stops
The tray can only show what it saw and still keeps.
Built by a creator, for his own channel first
I built the moderator my own channel needed.
Hey friends, I'm Mike. My channel grew to 50,000 subscribers, and the comments grew well past 50,000 with it. No one creator can read every comment at that size. I valued the community that built up around my channel, but the volume and intensity of the comments were overwhelming.
When trolls started taking the time I wanted to spend with that community, I dusted off the toolkit and built The Litter Tray around the rules and restraint I wanted for my own audience. I want other creators to get set up in minutes, set the rules that matter to them, and make persistent trolls much harder to miss, so they can get back to making videos.
Mike