Hiding a user from your YouTube channel stops new comments, live chats and Community posts from that account appearing on the channel. YouTube's help is explicit: the person is not notified. Past activity from associated accounts is not hidden. Past comments from hidden users will not show on the Comments page in YouTube Studio.

That last point is why creators reach for an archive after a ban. Studio's live Comments page is no longer a place to re-read what that person said. The comments may still exist on YouTube in some form, or they may already be gone, but the moderation surface you used yesterday is no longer showing them.

What Hide user from channel actually does

YouTube documents two native routes. From a comment, use More, then Hide from channel. From YouTube Studio, open Settings, then Community moderation, then User management, and paste a channel URL into Hidden users. Recheck those labels on the day you use them.

Un-hiding the person lets them comment again from that point on. It does not put back comments the hide already removed. The Litter Tray's YouTube client records the same permanence: hiding rides on rejecting one comment with a ban, and the comments that ban removed, including replies underneath them, are gone on YouTube for good. Replies can belong to other people who did nothing.

That is why a ban is the wrong first step when a cooling-off window would do, and why a searchable record still matters after you have taken it.

When an archive is the job, not nostalgia

After a ban you may still need to:

  • Explain to a teammate why the hide happened, with the comments in view rather than from memory.
  • See whether a new account is repeating the same wording or targeting the same people.
  • Keep the moderation evidence YouTube's Comments page has stopped listing.

None of that requires a complete copy of every comment YouTube ever served. It requires the comments the tray actually observed, with standing and actions attached, for as long as this tray still retains them.

An illustration of the Viewers screen, including banned standing, which is where the archive still attaches to the person.

What The Litter Tray keeps, and what it does not

The tray mirrors live and historical comments into searchable, video-filterable queues with thread context, classifications and moderation state. Historical comments brought in at connect time are kept for reference. They are not classified, alerted on, or moderated.

Retention is narrower than "keep everything". When a successful check no longer returns a comment, the tray marks it unavailable without assuming who removed it. Ordinary stored text can later be removed after a delay measured from the last successful sighting. Comments the owner has acted on, pending decisions, comments by banned or probated authors, and name-pattern matches currently keep their stored text even if they become unavailable. These are the product’s current keep-text rules, not a promise of permanent storage.

The archive is therefore a working record of what the tray saw, not a promise to reconstruct unavailable YouTube history, and not a promise to retain every comment forever.

A confirmed channel ban in the tray still requires explicit confirmation. It hides the viewer from the YouTube channel and keeps the local action and affected-comment evidence. Name-pattern alerts can flag a look-alike display name or handle afterwards; they do not prove identity and they do not hold the new comment on their own.

What this still does not do

  • It does not import YouTube's complete hidden-user list. YouTube does not expose that list through the available API.
  • It does not identify one person across replacement accounts.
  • It does not put back comments YouTube already destroyed as a side effect of the ban.
  • It does not post or reply as the creator.

See comment archive, viewer standing, and viewer history.

Correction, 20 September 2026: Clarified unavailable-comment checks, current text-retention behavior and the limits of the archive. Removed the unsupported fixed deletion deadline.