Cannot query for user RedstoneQuarry

I recently added “RedstoneQuarry” to the sheet for this channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/RedstoneQuarry/videos Since then, it got stuck on that entry with the debug sheet message “Cannot query for user RedstoneQuarry”. When I use “UUW_OAaMdUH3fF00fh8_Koeg” instead, which is the playlist ID of their automatic “all uploads” playlist, that fails with “Cannot query for user UUW_OAaMdUH3fF00fh8_Koeg”. Only the channel ID, which is “UCW_OAaMdUH3fF00fh8_Koeg” (C as second character) works, which can apparently only be obtained by saving the HTML source of the channel page and finding the »"externalId":"UCW_OAaMdUH3fF00fh8_Koeg"« element in some long JSON object (or maybe it’s always the playlist ID, but with a C?). Other short channel URLs, like “slicedlime”, “TheHappieCat” or “SiberianHat” work fine.

[victorjzsun]

Thanks for making the gif, added it to the README with https://github.com/Elijas/auto-youtube-subscription-playlist-2/commit/0ca280edd9a81f8974040d578d58ecbb27557273.

[victorjzsun]

Interesting that they removed it. Here are two possible solutions:

Solution 1: Search for the custom url in YT Search to get a list of channels, and then check each channel to see if the custom url matches (source: https://gist.github.com/stvar/f57e9792c3dc49fab2690247d6ee74de). This can be implemented within the spreadsheet allowing users to input custom urls too. One disadvantage is if the custom url is too popular in channel name or is not even in the channel name, this method will fail.

Solution 2: The Video api contains channel id so we can create a modal that allows a user to input a video id and get the associated channel id. This method requires more work for both developers and the user but has no failure cases.