YouTube now lets Creators ‘pause’ video comments

YouTube is now rolling out a straightforward “Pause” option to its comment moderation tools for Creators.

This will simply “prevent the creation of new comments at the video level while preserving comments that were already published.” This joins the broad option to disable entirely, or manually review before publishing.

This Pause option appears in video-level comment settings of the YouTube app watch page, as well as YouTube Studio on desktop and mobile.

In testing, YouTube has found that Creators and moderators use Pause to:

• “Gain more flexibility over how they manage their comments”
• “Take a break from managing comments if they become overwhelming, without having to turn them off completely”

YouTube is taking this launch to rename some of the settings, but existing functionality does not change. The full list of options today is below:

• On, with optional comment moderation settings –
  • None – Don’t hold any comments for review before publishing them
  • Basic – Hold potentially inappropriate comments for review
  • Strict – Hold a broader range of potentially inappropriate comments for review
  • Hold All – Hold all comments for review 
• Pause
• Off

More on YouTube:

• YouTube app rolling out real-time updating view and like counts
• YouTube for Google TV gets a colorful new design for history and playlists
• YouTube begins public testing of ‘Playables’ gaming effort [Update: Rolling out]