Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

YouTube /c/ and /user/ aliases are treated interchangeably but might point to different accounts #76

Open
cycloptux opened this issue Nov 23, 2020 · 0 comments

Comments

@cycloptux
Copy link

Currently, the /c/ and /user/ URLs are both treated as interchangeable aliases within the YouTube parser, but this might not be true for all URLs.

Example:
https://www.youtube.com/c/Defender833/
https://www.youtube.com/user/Defender833/

Both result in { name: 'Defender833', mediaType: 'channel', provider: 'youtube' } but they are actually different channels: when /c/ is used, the "Defender833" name refers to the customUrl parameter of the YouTube API (hence being found by looking for a generic search param) while with /user/ you are actually looking at the user name, which can be targeted by a different call within the YouTube API.

I was not aware of this until now but apparently, /user used to be the unique ID 2005-2013, at which point the userIDs (/channel/) got introduced. It was possible for a brief period to still claim usernames, but soon after, /c got implemented via Google+.
As a consequence to this, while /c/ often is the same as /user/ for many folks, it can be something else.

It would be useful if there was a way to discern whether the channel name was of "user" or "c" type from the .parse function output.

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Labels
None yet
Projects
None yet
Development

No branches or pull requests

1 participant