YouTube Question Anyone else having comment sections disabled at random?

[ccrtelevision]

This is something that happened to me recently and I'm curious if anyone has noticed anything similar on their channels. A little over a month ago, I had a comment section disabled right after uploading a video-- twice. It was really inconvenient and a bit damaging to for the performance of that video, but I was easily able to tick comments back on in my settings both times. A couple weeks ago, I realized that this was not an isolated case; over fifty videos across my entire channel displayed 0 comments for seemingly no reason, and I had to manually re-enable the comment sections back on every one of them. Thankfully none of the comments were actually deleted, but it was extremely inconvenient and baffling to me.

My channel is centered around toys, though my content is made for teens and adult collectors (not kids), so I know it had nothing to do with COPPA or anything like that. I thought this was a glitch that only happened to me, but over the past month I've seen, albeit sparingly, comment sections across various niches disabled on videos I was watching from channels that would otherwise leave their comments open. I'm wondering if the same thing happened to them and they haven't noticed yet. This only happened within the past month or so and I haven't found any information on other forums talking about this.. am I going crazy or should we all check our comment sections? lol

 

[DamoΓÇÖs Paintings]

Check to make sure you didnΓÇÖt accidentally set your video to ΓÇ£yes itΓÇÖs made for kidsΓÇ¥, as I recently discovered on one of mine, or if you didnΓÇÖt set it to that, just go in and make sure anyways, and just check in YouTube Studio any restrictions, if it says ΓÇ£noneΓÇ¥ then you should be fine and comments should be all normal.

 

[EvaWar]

Yes! None of our videos are set to "made for kids", but constantly the comments are getting disabled. Some of them multiple times, as in I'll enable the comments again, come back a couple hours later and they off again! Seriously annoying!

 

[Beanie Draws]

Yes! None of our videos are set to "made for kids", but constantly the comments are getting disabled. Some of them multiple times, as in I'll enable the comments again, come back a couple hours later and they off again! Seriously annoying!

I wonder if it's a wide spread bug. I've had comments that had bad words in it completely bypass my bad words filter and make it to public. Comments with profanities that obviously should be blocked that make it through some how.

No doubt a lot of it is simply bugs. Will be curious to hear if others are having similar issues if this is more of a recent thing.

 

[EvaWar]

I wonder if it's a wide spread bug. I've had comments that had bad words in it completely bypass my bad words filter and make it to public. Comments with profanities that obviously should be blocked that make it through some how.

No doubt a lot of it is simply bugs. Will be curious to hear if others are having similar issues if this is more of a recent thing.

I noticed it since I started uploading regularly, July or August. Yesterday I double checked and 5 videos had their comments disabled.

I've tried to Google it before, but none of the results that came back seemed related. There's no indication of what is causing it, no warnings, no spam comments etc. As @ccrtelevision mentioned, need to go through the video list and look for the videos with zero comments to find the ones with it disabled.

 

[Beanie Draws]

I noticed it since I started uploading regularly, July or August. Yesterday I double checked and 5 videos had their comments disabled.

I've tried to Google it before, but none of the results that came back seemed related. There's no indication of what is causing it, no warnings, no spam comments etc. As @ccrtelevision mentioned, need to go through the video list and look for the videos with zero comments to find the ones with it disabled.

So you found out by seeing 0 comments on in the video panel on videos that normally would have comments in the past?

Did the videos contain children? YouTube can detect if your video contains children and will disable comments if they deep the video is "made for children" or contains content that could be appealing to children.

But if it's an error, that's strange.

Might need to contact @TeamYouTube on twitter. They're pretty responsive on twitter.

 

[erienne]

Do your videos happen to show any faces? Because YouTube has the ability, when processing your video, to recognize faces and in accordance with COPPA, they'll disable comments on ANY video that show faces that look like the face is a minor, which I also find inconvenient as well. Or maybe, it took notice of faces on the toys, (which I find ridiculous but might as well be,) and it looked like the toy was perhaps a child or minor, and that's why the comments are closed.

I also read your other responses below, and yes, even if you mark your videos as "Not Made for Kids," if it looks like it's made for kids, YouTube will just mark it themselves and disable your comments.

 

[EvaWar]

Yeah, it's clear they detecting something, but there's no indication of what it is. There's no faces in my videos, but maybe it works on audio as well?

Here is a screenshot of my videos page. You can filter for videos set for kids, neither option returns any results, either for set by myself or set by YouTube. On the right of the screen, that where I look, if those numbers go to zero then I know the comments are disabled. If I enable them again all the comments come back:

Maybe I'll try hit them up on Twitter if I get round to it. I'm just glad I found someone else it's happening to and it's not me going crazy!

 

[Beanie Draws]

Yeah, it's clear they detecting something, but there's no indication of what it is. There's no faces in my videos, but maybe it works on audio as well?

Here is a screenshot of my videos page. You can filter for videos set for kids, neither option returns any results, either for set by myself or set by YouTube. On the right of the screen, that where I look, if those numbers go to zero then I know the comments are disabled. If I enable them again all the comments come back:

View attachment 8355

Maybe I'll try hit them up on Twitter if I get round to it. I'm just glad I found someone else it's happening to and it's not me going crazy!

Definitely sounds like a bug. If you notice it going to 0, reactivating comments wouldn't bring them back. YouTube have stated that if a video is marked "Made For Children" by mistake, the comments can't be brought back, so the fact you have the comments showing again definitely indicates a bug.

Might be a similar bug that I've encountered where offensive comments made it past my bad word filters. I sense the two are linked, and seems they're still working on my comment sorting for creator studio app, I sens there's a few bugs floating around from that.

Definitely DM Team YouTube on Twitter. They will give you more advice on what you can do about it.


Maybe show us a screenshot of when you notice it going to 0 again. Has it happened on multiple browsers? And does is continue to show 0 after resetting the computer? It could sometimes be a display bug or a cache bug as well.

 

[EvaWar]

It took a while, but here it is on another video:

Not a display bug, the setting has actually changed to disabled:

 

[EvaWar]

I got a reply from YouTube on Twitter:

This is what they linked to:
Learn why comments are turned off - YouTube Help (google.com)

It kind of implies that if you have a channel that may involve children's content, that you would need to have your comment settings set to review all comments. I just did a bulk change on all my videos to hold potentially inappropriate comments. If that doesn't work then I'll have to change it to hold all comments for review.

 

[Damon]

Yeah, if it even looks like kids might be interested, they're going to shut down comments.

 

[Beanie Draws]

It kind of implies that if you have a channel that may involve children's content, that you would need to have your comment settings set to review all comments. I just did a bulk change on all my videos to hold potentially inappropriate comments. If that doesn't work then I'll have to change it to hold all comments for review.

Well the changes in COPPA did indicate that if content involves children's content, or if children appear in the video, that it can be set to "made for kids" but if you didn't do that yourself, it looks like they may have done that for you which they did indicate could happen, and tubebuddy does have a COPPA Center which will scan your entire channel for anything like this. But I've also seen channels and videos that weren't made for kids have their comments turned off. It's hard to tell if they were doing it manually to avoid trolls or if they were done automatically.

That said, the thumbnails look pretty kid focused and roblox is a fairly kids focused game, weather it actually is kids content or not. Lots of minecraft and lego channels were facing similar issues, but your thumbnails without a doubt look like the bots would see it as children's content with the roblox and bright colour thumbnails.

It's something that could happen to my channel seems I do dinosaur art. My channel isn't intended for kids because of the style and complexity of my art, but they could always determine otherwise, and I could very well fall into the same situation.