Tutorial
Connect your channel
What happens when you connect your channel: what starts by itself, and what waits for you.
Drawn from the product as it works today. The pictures are sketches, not screenshots.
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Step one
Your tray, before a channel
A new tray starts empty. You sign in, give it a name, and from then on it shows you one next step: connecting your YouTube channel. The button is Connect YouTube. There's nothing else to find and switch on later in Settings.
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Step two
Sign in on Google's consent screen
The button takes you to Google. Sign in with the Google account that owns your channel, and Google asks whether the tray may act for your channel. That is the same authority you have in YouTube Studio, and the tray uses it on your channel and nowhere else. We never see your Google password. You can take the permission away at any time in your Google account's security settings, and the tray stops working for that channel when you do. We check every day. Once Google confirms the access has been revoked, or if the tray hasn't been able to confirm its access for 21 days, we erase that channel's imported YouTube data from the live tray. Disconnecting in the app erases it straight away.
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Step three
Coming back is the start
As soon as Google sends you back, your channel is connected and the tray starts reading its comments. There's no second button to press for the channel itself.
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Step four
Your history starts arriving on its own
Without being asked, the tray begins walking your channel's existing comments into your private archive. That walk starts itself the moment you connect, and if it is interrupted it carries on from where it stopped rather than starting over. What arrives is whatever YouTube still returns at the time, not a complete history. Comments from before you turned the tray on are kept for context and are read-only here: the tray never acts on them, so if one needs dealing with, do it in YouTube Studio. The import is for reference, and you can pause it whenever you like.
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Step five
A few questions, and a little practice
Next come a few set-up questions: what your channel is about, what your comment section is like, and when a repeat offender should go on timed probation. Then the tray deals you a few of your own real comments to practise on. Practice is only practice: nothing you do there changes anything on YouTube or in your live tray. You can stop at any point and come back to it.
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Step six
Start my tray
Set-up ends with one button: Start my tray. Press it and your tray starts with everything set to Test, which means it asks you before it holds a comment. The one exception is a viewer on probation: their comments are held automatically. Removing a comment is always your decision. Hold for review shows what being asked looks like.