When you hide a user from your YouTube channel, new comments, live chat messages and Community posts from that account stop appearing on it. YouTube doesn't tell the person. Its help page adds two details that matter later: past activity from what it calls associated accounts isn't hidden, and the hidden user's own past comments no longer show on the Comments page in YouTube Studio.

That last detail is why creators want an archive after a ban. You can't go back to the Comments page in YouTube Studio and re-read what the person said. The comments might still exist somewhere on YouTube or they might be gone, but the page you were working from yesterday no longer shows them.

What Hide user from channel actually does

YouTube gives you two ways to do it. 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. YouTube can change these labels, so check its help page if yours look different.

Unhiding the person lets them comment again from then on. It doesn't bring back the comments the hide removed. A ban from the tray works the same way, because it is YouTube's own action: the tray rejects one comment and bans the person who wrote it. The comments that ban removes are gone from YouTube for good, and so are the replies underneath them, some of which were written by other people who did nothing wrong.

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.

Why you still need the record after a ban

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 record of what you decided after YouTube's Comments page has stopped listing the comments.

None of that needs a copy of every comment ever posted on your channel. It needs the comments your tray has seen, with the viewer's standing and your decisions alongside, for as long as the tray keeps them.

An illustration of the Viewers screen. A banned viewer stays on it, with their record.

What The Litter Tray keeps, and what it does not

The tray copies your comments, new and old, into lists you can search and filter by video, with the thread around each one, how it was classified and what was decided about it. Comments from before you connected are brought in for reference only. The tray doesn't classify them, alert you about them or moderate them.

The tray doesn't keep everything. YouTube data, such as a comment's words, the commenter's name and the video's title, is kept only while YouTube still confirms it. The tray checks again in the background, and anything YouTube hasn't confirmed within 23 days is removed. An email waiting to be sent keeps its words until it goes. Your decisions about a comment or the viewer who wrote it (a hold, an approval, a ban or a probation) stay on the record, without the comment's words once those are removed.

So the archive is a working record of what the tray saw. It can't rebuild YouTube history that's no longer available, and it won't keep every comment for ever.

Banning a viewer from the tray always asks you to confirm. The ban hides them from your YouTube channel, and the tray keeps a record of it and of the comments it affected. Afterwards, name-pattern alerts can flag a display name or handle that looks similar. An alert like that doesn't prove it's the same person, and it doesn't hold the new comment by itself.

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 write replies: it posts only the replies the creator writes.

See comment archive, viewer standing, and viewer history.

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

Correction, 24 October 2026: The tray now keeps YouTube data, comment words included, only while YouTube confirms it, and removes it within 23 days; an email still waiting to be sent keeps its words until it is sent. The record of a ban stays.