How the extension works

The panel

Open a video on youtube.com/watch and the side panel shows that video's receipts: timestamped notes the community has pinned, newest activity first. Signed out, you can read every public receipt, click a timestamp to jump the video to that moment, and see votes and comment counts. Signing in adds posting, voting, and commenting.

The timeline strip

Above the feed, a timeline strip mirrors the video's runtime with a marker at every receipt's timestamp. The playhead tracks the video as it plays, so you can see where you are relative to the receipts around you. Click a marker, or click or drag the strip itself, to seek. The strip's play and pause button controls the tab, so you don't need to switch focus to the video.

Composing a receipt

Signed-in viewers can pin a note at the current moment from the compose bar at the bottom of the panel, or use the quick-add button under the timeline to start a note pre-filled with the current timestamp. Compose supports:

• Bold, italic, and underline formatting, plus bulleted and numbered lists, block quotes, and links
• Dropping in a GIF from a searchable picker
• Embedding a different video by pasting its link
• Trimming a clip of that embedded video to a start and end point, with a live preview

Nothing you add is uploaded to file storage. GIFs, embeds, and clips are all saved as links, so the composer never touches an upload path. New receipts and comments go into review the moment you post them and are visible to you right away; once a moderator clears one it becomes visible to everyone else.

Voting and comments

Signed-in viewers can validate or invalidate a receipt and vote on individual comments, with counts updating right away. Every receipt's comment toggle opens an inline thread with its own composer, so a video's worth of receipts can turn into real conversations.

Feeds

A switcher above the feed lets a signed-in viewer move between the public feed, their private feed, and any custom feed they own or were invited to for the current video. The timeline and composer follow whichever feed is showing, so a note you post lands in the feed you're looking at. Feeds beyond the public one follow the same plan limits as the web app.

Notifications

A bell in the panel header shows an unread badge and a dropdown of recent activity on your receipts and comments, newest first, with a "mark all read" action.

The toolbar icon

The Vid Receipts toolbar icon shows a small badge. Signed in, a red badge counts your unread notifications and takes priority on every tab. On a YouTube watch page, an emerald badge shows how many public receipts that video has, capped at "99+", and it works whether you're signed in or not. With no unread notifications and no watch page in front, the icon stays bare. The count is a read of the same public receipt total the website shows; nothing about your browsing is tracked. You can switch the badge off under "Show counters on the toolbar icon" in the panel's account section.

Surprise Me

The shuffle button in the header jumps your current tab to a video from the same curated pool the web app draws from. It works whether you're signed in or not, and it won't repeat a video until every video in the pool has come up once. That memory is shared across every tab, so picking up the panel somewhere else continues where you left off rather than starting over.

Delight

Next to the shuffle button is a heart. Signed in, tap it to mark the video you're watching as one you loved, so Surprise Me leans toward more like it next time. There's no matching thumbs-down; the signal for "not this" is simply shuffling again.

Watch on Vid Receipts

While a video is bound to the panel, a "Watch on Vid Receipts" link sits at the left of the header. It pauses the video and opens that same moment on the website in a new tab, so you can pick up on the full page where you left off.

Pin the video you're working on

By default the panel follows whichever YouTube tab is in front. That's handy when you're just watching, but not when you're mid-note and want to look something up in another tab.

While you have the compose or comments tray open, or an unfinished draft saved, switching to a different tab keeps the panel on the video you were working on instead of following you. A short note confirms it, and the header swaps to a compact identity of the pinned video. You can research anywhere, including in other YouTube tabs, and your draft and place stay put.

You can also pin any video by hand: tap the pin button in the header. While pinned:

• The header shows the pinned video's thumbnail and title. Tap it to jump back to that tab, or tap the pin again to unpin.
• If another YouTube tab starts playing, the pinned video pauses itself, so two videos never play over each other. Its timeline stays fully scrubbable in the panel.
• Surprise Me opens its pick in a new tab rather than replacing the pinned video.
• If the pinned tab is closed or moves off the video, the panel offers to reopen it right where you left off, or to unpin and go back to following the tab in front.

Unpin at any time to return to the default follow behavior.

Hiding the panel on the website

The panel is redundant when you're already on vidreceipts.com, so by default it stays out of the way there. You can turn that off in the panel's account section under "Hide the panel on vidreceipts.com".

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