Way to View/Archive Offline or See Exported Data

[rmanzt]

Is there any way to save all of the generated comments in a way where they can be viewed in their entirety later on?

The program has an export function but no import function.

I'm trying to archive all of a channels video comments, but want to make sure comments won't change/be deleted based on the current state of the channel in the future.

[mattwright324]

I guess to clarify how it works...

Once a comment has been downloaded during a refresh it is there in the database and won't be overwritten or deleted on future refreshes. I can't detect when comments have been deleted. I could potentially update comments but do not do that.

You should be fine.

[bernard01]

This comment suite is awesome. I like the stability of the database. If something does not work as I expect then I can always query the database and find out what is going on. Matt, as you say, you cannot find out whether a comment gets deleted. I am glad that the database keeps old comments that get deleted in YouTube so one can build a good history in the database! Now it is the nature of distributed databases that they get out of sync, and please let me discuss the case where a comment gets deleted. You say you cannot find out. I guess that you mean there is no notification, meaning that YouTube does not let you ask to report deleted comments. Which makes sense. Because they are gone in YouTube.

But I guess it is possible to make a request by the comment ID in a video and check if it can be found in YouTube. This will be an expensive operation because it is a single request for each comment! But can you consider this functionality? The comment table would need a "deleted" flag or we would need a small index table that contains IDs of deleted comments. Or whatever feature that records this state. It would not be that straight forward because there is the added possibility that a video is deleted or an entire channel is deleted of a video is made private with the result being effectively the same. Considering these options it would be possible theoretically even that a deleted comment comes back this way because a video with its comment changes from private back to public..

[bernard01]

Deleted comments as I mentioned earlier can be handled easily as I found out. I created a new instance with a fresh database that does not contain the deleted comments. Then I work with the differential between the exports of the two databases. So my ideas regarding the flagging of deleted comments was not that good after all.

[mattwright324]

Thinking about it, in the realm of 'deleted comments' it could be reasonable for me to display some kind of indicator when a comment is no longer viewable based on the video status. This could for example be new column(s) on the videos table comments_viewable_in_web and comments_viewable_in_api.

A video's comments are not viewable when any of the following is true:

• Actually has comments disabled
• Video has madeForKids=true
• Video is private or no longer exists
• Video region restriction has ~249 blocked countries (if I remember right)
  • Edit: in the page you see Comments are turned off but you can still see them in the api
• Could be one other case I'm not thinking of, possibly with livestreams

[bernard01]

On the other hand:
-- Get the list of videos in the current database to build a fresh database to attach:
select
'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=' || vid.video_id
from videos vid;

-- Find comments in the current database that do not exist in an attached fresh
-- database. Purpose is to find comments that were added in the current database but deleted after added.
select
*
from
comments co left join fresh.comments co2
on co.comment_id = co2.comment_id
where co2.comment_id is null;

It's really easy to do with "DB Browser for SQLite"