" Thanks James, I wasn't aware that tab buttons could be multi-functonal like that. Not sure how obvious that would be to new sifters, given that I never knew about it. Would it not add value if that was exposed through the main queue tab when you first load up the site?

So whenever you hit Queue, you can then choose from a channel, rather than Channel/queue? That way you visibly filter the queue and you could summarise the state of each queue, indicate how long it was, the oldest item, item with the most votes so far etc."

We have talked about a "widget" in the past that would let you select a channel from an ajax window, the concern has been that we can't duplicate it for people who have ajax disabled. Currently all the ajax functionality stuff degrades nicely.

grspec, you can change the default page view in your profile already.

Also re: the ajax video system, digg does something like this currently, honestly i kind of prefer the set up that we have at the moment, but I don't know how others feel.

/prods conversation back to the new queue escape

The problem is too few video being shown on the front page. I have always disliked the fact that you can only see a small amount of videos on the FP. I would really like to see a thumbnail type of system where we can see essentially the same info such as title name, number of votes, tags, etc, but only thumbnails of the screenshot then once clicked or on a mouseover you get a lightbox or ajax style popup/popover to play the video in much like the way the login box works.

To me this would give us more videos to view on the front page and reduce the need to have more votes to escape the queue. You could also use the same format for the queue so we can see more videos at one shot.

I would love to see about 25 to 50 vids on the front page to sift through.

Comment in question. http://www.videosift.com/video/Wrestling-with-Microsoft-Vista-Speech-Recognition

(Do these show up in log when the AJAX hits submit from client side? Or it doesn't even make it to server??)

Alexa is crap, we often see ourselves ranked really poorly on days with very high traffic. The worst part is that not only must you run ie you have to then install a browser plugin. Half of our traffic is firefox, with more trending towards that on a daily basis. As for their rankings on channels i take that with a grain of salt. I find it hard to believe that less than 1% of visitors visit talk, or the queue. Also our sub channels have a page rank of 5, so i have to assume that google thinks they are important. All in all it would be nice if google would use some statistical modeling mixed with their toolbar, and analytics information to develop more reliable statistics than alexa. It seems that all site admins despise it, but it is still THE metric for valuing a websites traffic.

What happens to sites using lots of ajax? They will clearly show larger discrepancies in page views, because content updates is not technically a page view. In short Alexa is broken... it's a shame that we are in some ways beholden to its monopoly.

The comment thing is happening because of ajax that lets you post comments while a video is playing back. The alternative would be to not be able to do that, and I think any of the members that have been around since before that was implemented would agree that the current method is preferable. As for your cursor that is pretty strange, I am not seeing it here, and we aren't doing anything with the cursors either in css or html. What browser are you using?

Hmm.. One thing try turning on http referrer if it is off, delete cookie, and re-login.
Another thing, do you know how to pull up the javscript console? Might be error msg in there.
Third, you can open the page about:config and search for javascript make sure it is still enabled.
Do you have a hosts file that blocks all the popup and advert IP addresses. It's possible that some ad needs to load before the javascript part.
I went through this no edit thing for awhile also.
Question, does click on favorite do it in AJAX, ie. loads in page while watching a video, or like refereshed page instead.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Voting has been modified a bit, but there are a few things happening in the background, so I'm not surprised that it lags sometimes.

Maybe the perception of slowness is increased because it's ajax. If the vote was actually a submit, perhaps the time would seem normal. So when you press the vote button, a script is triggered that goes and finds out who you are, and makes sure you have the credentials to vote, it then inserts your vote in the database and returns a success code.

Because we're making a lot of changes, we're concerned about performance and scalability. We're adding new features all the time which use more memory, and we're growing in the number of visits we receive. At some point, I think these two activities collide.

I'm not complaining that we are getting so many visits (that would be silly) just saying, performance is becoming more of an issue for us.

we were just commenting that voting seems to hang differently than the rest of the site. I realize it is sometimes laggy and most of the time fast, but the voting code is original, versus the newer ajax code. Maybe the meanalo (?) code is bloated? Or it just my imagination on voting.

winkler, that's why our second level of sifting is humans. people have pretty good memory, so when we see dominoes again, i think i duped it and fixed the original tags because of spelling problem. In this case, no AJAX would help because I had to google for it, but I had the advantage of knowing it was in here somewhere. So it does work, and this is a good example of how a good sifter enables this site to be cool. (pats self on back).. but seriously, don't worry about lost votes or dupes. I still post a bunch, and others are there to smite down my videos.. because they happened to have seen them the first time around.

I guess the issue I'm thinking about is this - I've had a couple posts get past the dupe detection, so it's not perfect. This dupe post is an example
- it didn't find the orginal.
I had searched for dominos too.. I thought this was a new killer entry. I see the problem now- dominos vs. dominoes.

I assume the dupe detection works is additive - the more tags match, the higher the ranking. So, searching for an indidual tag (dominos), even Ajax-style, has less value than a compound key search (tag1..tagN,title)

Guess I'll do a workaround on my part- do a quick pass on tags and title, check for dupes, then wordsmith if necessary. Thanks for the discussion.

winkler, you could just search for the video before you start copy & pasting. I find the new submission works pretty well, "When I paste the embed code, it could know if it's a dupe." -> it does! Obviously there are 18 versions of the same video on YouTube and they should merge them all.. but also the pseudo-match by tags & title show five top hits, which works for most videos. Unless the original or your video submission is way off on description, I find it works pretty good.

So I guess you are suggesting AJAX submission page to get more immediate feedback, in case you never bothered to search.

It's funny that you presume more resources are required for those things when it's quite the opposite, if anything.
There is no more processing required to post a comment with Ajax than normal posting. In fact, the server-side process is much simpler and likely uses fewer resources.
As far as the instantaneous siftbot goes, that will be a great reduction in processing power because with a cron job, siftbot searches *all* recent comments for invocations (very taxing), but in his renovated form he will only do processing on a comment-by-comment basis. That's a vast improvement.

lucky, just curious, how much more CPU and memory hit are you seeing with v2.0 stuff (AJAX) and siftbot immediate response (tags) stuff instead of hourly cron jobs?

Here's a good idea, the videos could have an email-this-video type link (which I hate those) AND/OR any email notifications can have a small text line talking about a sponsor.

If you had enough outgoing notification emails, that might be something you can pimp out for revenue.

The other way would be banners, sponsored videos that play before / after video (You got the AJAX working to support this)

Maybe siftbot can spam comments with semi related ads. ie. you could sell metrics that siftbot would plant relevant corporate text into a video comment portion.