Remove undesirable comments on YouTube

Martin Brinkmann
Sep 30, 2012
Updated • Nov 13, 2013
Firefox, Firefox add-ons, Youtube
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Ever since Google acquired the video hosting platform YouTube it has been criticized for the unmoderated comment section on the site.

Comments are often filled with profanities and insults that many YouTube regulars have long since given up on the feature and started to ignore comments on the site for the most part.

Google for some time now tries to combat the spam problem on YouTube by asking users to switch from nicknames to real names in hope that less anonymity on the site would lead to less profanity on it.Since it is an optional feature, it is unlikely that it will have a big impact on the current comment landscape.

The Firefox add-on Comment Snob seems like a better alternative. It enables you to filter out all or select comments on YouTube based on rules that you define in the options.

It in particular allows you to:

  • Hide all comments
  • Hide comments that have no capital letters
  • Hide comments that have only capital letters
  • Hide comments that do not start with a capital letter
  • Hide comments that have excessive punctuation
  • Hide comments that have excessive capitalization
  • Hide comments that include profanity
  • Block comments that include custom keywords or phrases, regular expressions allowed

The extension displays a single line in place of removed comments that highlights why the comment has been removed. Options to display select comments directly on the page are available, which can be useful if a comment is part of a thread that you are interested in.

The program manipulates the comment section on page load with no apparent delay in rendering time. Non-English users need to change the dictionary locale as it is set to en-US in the options. Rules for other sites can be added to the extension. A documentation on how to do that is available on the developer website.

The extension filters out many comments on YouTube. Sometimes, you may be left with no comment at all after the page has been processed by it. Especially the option to add custom words and phrases can be useful to remove popular comment types that you are not interested in.

Update: The extension is fully compatible with YouTube's new Google+ comment system. You can use it in pretty much the same way as before. Considering that things have turned south after Google made the switch, you may be in need of the comment even more than before.

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Comments

  1. anonymous said on September 23, 2020 at 9:50 am
    Reply

    thanks you saved my 1000 tabs :)

  2. Anonymous said on September 23, 2020 at 10:00 am
    Reply

    Fantastic! Thank you! This worked like a charm. Had exactly the same issue in Firefox on a PC and this fixed it.

  3. J Smith said on September 23, 2020 at 2:24 pm
    Reply

    Thank you for sharing this! Like you, I’d noticed that disabling/re-enabling the extension would work for that browser session, but I hadn’t tried anything yet to force a fix. I’m SO glad it was this easy!

    I sure hope the OneTab team issues an official fix ASAP, though. Now that it’s been a few days, they’re starting to get bad reviews, which is unfortunate.

    1. White said on September 23, 2020 at 6:35 pm
      Reply

      Yes! I also tried the workaround. I also reported this bug to OneTab team on the first day I faced this issue.
      Thanks, Ashwin for the fix!

  4. Ken said on September 23, 2020 at 4:17 pm
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    I was nearing desperation when I found your direction. It worked.

    Thank you so much.

  5. OneTab team said on September 23, 2020 at 4:52 pm
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    Hi, OneTab developer here. Sorry for this – it’s not clear why this bug is suddenly happening for some people, but we’re urgently investigating this with the Mozilla/Firefox team and will be providing a fix very shortly.

  6. TRS said on September 23, 2020 at 4:55 pm
    Reply

    Thank you so much for sharing this fix! You saved my tabs. The only note/point I would like to add is for Step 2.

    Perhaps put a note stating they should copy Step 3 and forward of your tutorial to Word. Once we close Firefox, we lose visibility to your tutorial. For me, I know I would not be able to remember the .bkp.

    Again, thank you!

  7. OneTab team said on September 23, 2020 at 5:36 pm
    Reply

    Easy temporary fix: To make OneTab work again, type “about:addons” in your Firefox address bar. Then find OneTab in the list of extensions, and click the blue toggle button twice. This will disable and then re-enable OneTab, and cause it to work again.

    We’re working with Mozilla for a permanent fix. Sorry for the inconvenience, this is a very strange issue that is only affecting the Firefox version of OneTab.

  8. don backer said on September 23, 2020 at 5:38 pm
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    I have found by disabling and then re-enable in the add on menu I get my tab back. Short term fix. Will try yours.

  9. Anonymous said on September 23, 2020 at 5:45 pm
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    Thank you. I thought I had lost a month of digging. I’ll be a little more attentive about exporting the urls from the extension list now. It’s a great tool but Firefox doesn’t always play nice with its extensions.

  10. OneTab team said on September 23, 2020 at 10:10 pm
    Reply

    Good news – I’ve been working with Mozilla all morning to resolve this. Mozilla have confirmed it was due to a bug in Firefox (related to extension permissions downgrades).

    To fix OneTab, just go to “about:addons” in your Firefox address bar, click the ‘cog’ icon in the top right, and click ‘Check for updates’. This will upgrade you to OneTab v1.39, which fixes the issue.

  11. Anonymous said on September 24, 2020 at 6:20 pm
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    Darn, I tried everything here and I still can’t get my tabs back. I even did a full system restore to a point last week hoping that my saved tabs would be in the old .xpi file, but no luck.

    I’m pretty disappointed :(

  12. Anonymous said on September 26, 2020 at 6:22 am
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    Probably I should’ve been more patient, but now I don’t know how to feel about this. I lost about 900 tabs in the recovery process (I reinstalled OneTab), which, incredible as it sounds, weren’t all just a messy dump I’m never going back to, but actually important stuff (yeah, I have a peculiar workflow).

    Trying to suppress the anger and reflecting on what happened, it seems I should blame myself for not having a backup. But surely I couldn’t back it up manually every time I save a tab, it would defy all purpose of having this addon in the first place. A couple of years ago data was stored at “~/.mozilla/firefox/%PROFILE%/jetpack/[email protected]/simple-storage”, and you could back it up with simple crontab. This is no longer the case, this folder is just empty. And since OneTab is closed-source black box, I couldn’t have done anything else as well.

    So the only reasonable lesson to be learned is that I actually must stop relying on OneTab, since sooner or later it will let me down again. Fuck it.

  13. ckjk said on September 26, 2020 at 5:05 pm
    Reply

    I just disable and re-enable. No tabs lost!

  14. bsdaddict said on September 29, 2020 at 10:21 am
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    I switched from OneTab to Tab Stash (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-stash/) months ago and haven’t looked back. I had never experienced any data loss with OneTab, although I was a bit concerned by some reports of data loss I read about. My main issue was with OneTabs performance, it’s a hog. I had been looking for a replacement and testing out a ton of addons for a couple of months when I finally discovered Tab Stash, and am damn glad I did. I really can’t recommend it strongly enough…

    1. Anonymous said on September 29, 2020 at 2:57 pm
      Reply

      Thanks, bsdaddict. Never tried it, looks nice, but I’m a bit concerned by small number of stashed tabs on these screenshots, not sure if it’d be usable when stashing a lot of tabs. How many tabs do you usually have stashed?

  15. bsdaddict said on October 3, 2020 at 3:40 am
    Reply

    Tab Stash is is a great alternative to One Tab, y’all… I made the switch months ago and am very happy with it.

  16. Nostradamus said on April 26, 2023 at 4:03 pm
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    >DO THIS FIRST: Before trying the following fix, I recommend disabling OneTab and re-enabling it from the about:addons page, to access and regain your tabs.

    Worked for me! Many, many thanks!

  17. MartinS said on August 18, 2023 at 7:07 pm
    Reply

    I know it’s late but ist there an option for chrome on android tablets aswell? My wife hates it that the search bar and Tab list will just come Up again when she Scrolls up

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