Gameplainer watches YouTube for new videos that mention your game in the title or description. When one shows up, it posts to Discord with a short outline of the video and a direct link straight to it.

This guide covers how to write the search so you catch what you want and skip what you don't.

The basics

Search is case-insensitive, so capitalisation never matters. Quoting a multi-word term narrows it to that exact phrase, which is great for precision but can be too strict for loose discovery. Reach for quotes when a phrase is getting drowned out by unrelated videos.

Matching several terms (OR)

Join alternatives with a single pipe to match any of them.

cuphead|"hollow knight"|"dead cells"

One rule matters here: quote every term that contains a space. If you leave a multi-word term unquoted next to a pipe, YouTube attaches the pipe to the words on either side and your search quietly becomes far narrower than you meant.

Right:

"women led games"|womenledgaming|indie

Wrong:

women led games|womenledgaming

That second one is read as women AND led AND (games OR womenledgaming), not the two alternatives you had in mind.

Two smaller notes. Spacing around the pipe makes no difference, so a|b and a | b behave the same. And in an OR the term with the most videos tends to fill most of the results, so avoid pairing a very broad word with a niche one or the niche term will barely show.

To follow several genuinely different games or topics, set up a separate YouTube monitor for each rather than packing them into one search. Keep each search focused on a single thing and its variations.

Searching for hashtags

A lot of people paste a hashtag straight into the box, like #womenledgaming. You do not need the #, and it is better left off. Type the hashtag as a plain word:

womenledgaming

YouTube does not handle the leading # reliably inside a search, so including it tends to make results inconsistent rather than better. Dropping it gives you the steady, predictable match. The same applies in the Exclude these words or phrases field, list the word without the #.

If a campaign runs under a few hashtag spellings, drop the hashes and join the words with a pipe, quoting any that contain spaces:

womenledgaming|womenledgames|"women led gaming"

Excluding words and phrases

Use the Exclude these words or phrases field below the search box to drop videos that contain certain words. Type plain words separated by spaces, and quote multi-word phrases. There is no need to add a dash, Gameplainer does that for you.

Search field: Tyr
Exclude field: kratos ragnarok "god of war"

Keep in mind that YouTube treats an exclusion as a downrank rather than a hard cut. If your game name overlaps a much bigger franchise, excludes alone may not fully clear the noise, and leading with a more specific positive term usually helps more than piling on more excludes.

Recipes

Track one game

"Space Pirate Trainer"

Catch a topic across spellings

"women led games"|womenledgaming|womenledgames

Game or studio in one pass

"Space Pirate Trainer"|RaboticaBV

Settings

These checkboxes sit underneath the search box on the forum settings page. Both are off by default.

Exact search string required
YouTube normally runs an elastic search, so "Bob's Burgers" also returns Bobs Burgers without the apostrophe. Tick this when only a 100 percent exact match will do.

Search case sensitive
Match the case you typed, so Bob Burgers will not match bob's BURGERS. Useful for a brand name that shares its spelling with a common word.

Filters

Muted usernames
Hide videos from specific channels you never want notifications about.

Subscriber count filter
Skip notifications from channels below a chosen subscriber count. Leave it blank to hear about every match, whatever the channel size.

Discord message details

When a video comes from a channel with a large audience, a flame emoji appears next to it so the heavy hitters stand out.

• 🔥 at least 10k subscribers
• 🔥🔥 at least 100k subscribers
• 🔥🔥🔥 more than 1 million subscribers

Troubleshooting