Welcome to VideoSift version 3.3. It's been a long time since our last major upgrade and in this time we have been considering lots of your great suggestions and some ideas of our own to present an upgrade that offers serious improvements to the individual and community user experience. There are so many new things it'll be hard to spit them all out in one breath, so I'll list them below in no particular order.

[More updates inside]


The system by which we've always awarded members Star Points has changed. Now, when a member fixes a Dead Pool video or has a comment applauded (15 votes), a Star Point is no longer awarded. Instead, they will be given 1 Power Point for their contribution. Star Points are very valuable and should not be subject to inflation as they've been for a long time. (For *quality Sift Talk posts, the author will still receive 1 Star Point.)



While reaching the Top 15 is a great achievement, a much more difficult task is to reach the highly sought after #1 position of all Top New Videos. Once a video achieves #1 status, it will have the #1 medal pinned to it's sleeve.




Whenever a video enters the Top 15 sidebar listing (for the main site, not channels), it will from that point on carry beside it an attractive medal to denote this achievement. (Thanks to pyrex for this medal.)



There is now a whole slew of new methods by which members will be recognized and encouraged for various statistic-based achievements. (This is primarily based on Farhad's Sift Crack suggestion.) Whenever an achievement is made, that quality member will receive a Profile Message (PM) from SiftBot with a note of congratulations. (These messages can be turned off in account filter settings.) Also, for several types of achievement, members are awarded a variable number of Power Points:

• Video Hits Top 15: 1 Power Point
• Video Hits #1: 2 Power Points
• Video enters a members personal Top 5 (based on votes): 1 Power Point
• Comment gets applauded with 15 votes: 1 Power Point
• Rank Improves (once in the last day): in top 10 users = 3 Power Points; top 11-25 users = 2 Power Points; top 26-100 users = 1 Power Point
• Vote Milestone: When a member achieves another 1000 votes received, 1 Power Point
• New Star Level Achieved: 2 Power Points for Bronze Crown, 1 Power Point otherwise
• Dead Pool Fix: 1 Power Point

A great part of this new Awards system is the Awards Listing that displays all the Power Points that have been awarded recently, including the recipient and the reason for the award.


On a daily basis SiftBot will start posting to his blog a rundown of big achievements of the day. This will include:

• Members who got a video into their personal top 5
• Who surpassed who the member rankings
• Users who have earned a new Star Level
• Members who reached a new vote milestone
• All videos that hit the top 15 or #1 in that day
• Top comments of the day
• Videos that had the most votes cast for them in the day

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• The rotating panel at the top of the sidebar can now be stepped through with a "next panel" link. Looking for a specific panel? Click the link until it appears.
• SiftBot comment counts will no longer have any affect on the total vote count displayed for a post. This means you will no longer be mislead into thinking there's more of a discussion than there really is.
• We've had lots of reports that the Top New Videos sidebar has seemed a bit stagnant lately, so we've shortened the lifetime down from 4 days to 3 days from submission.
• Sift Talk channel invocations have been fixed so multiple channels can now properly be invoked.
• No more accidental video down votes. When casting a down vote you'll first be asked if you're sure you want to proceed.
• When your queue is full you can now validate your embed on the submission "Full Queue" page.
• Your email preferences will now be sticky on the video/talk/blog post submission form.
• If your NSFW filter is on, filtered videos will now have a generic thumbnail in case the actual video thumbnail itself is not safe for viewing.
• You will now receive email notifications when a new video is added to a playlist that you have favorited.
• The *sticky invocation now costs 1 Power Point.
• update: hover your mouse of the votes on a published video to see the total number of unique member views
• update: there is now a filter for long videos and another for profile comment emails in your account filter preferences

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The long sought after ability to transfer votes from a duplicate video to the original is now possible. A new *dupeof invocation is available. It transfers all unique votes from the dupe to the original then kills the dupe. It's a unique invocation and must be used like so:

*dupeof=http://videosift.com/video/link-to-the-original-video

This invocation is only available for Bronze Crown Bronze Diamond (250) members because it results in such a powerful, permanent change to the system. It can be invoked on a video with any status (discarded, dead, etc.) that is a true duplicate of another video. However, a member may not invoke *dupeof on duplicates of their own submissions.

Bronze Crown members can now use a YouTube video as an alternate comment avatar. If specified by a Crown member, their usual comment avatar will have a border around it to signify that it can be clicked into a YouTube video.

Video embeds are now permitted in comments.

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Fora.tv and vSocial have been removed from the list of approved video hosts. The following have been added to the approved list:

• NBC
• MTV Music
• Hulu
• Comedy Central
• Game Trailers
• Veoh

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A new tiny ribbon has been added to the very top of the page to display mini logos to other sites in the Sift Partners network.

Added to the member profile are a Top Comments sidebar panel and, in the Statistics sidebar panel, the number of Top 15 videos and #1 videos stats.

The Top Users sidebars displayed in a channel now display only the top users for that specific channel.

A new major tab has been added labeled "Discussions". This tab displays a listing of the highest rated comments submitted in the past few hours.

A new area for real-time chatting among members called Sift Lounge is available to Gold-100 members and above. If you're eligible to participate in the lounge, you'll see a link in the right side of the new ribbon bar at the very top of the page.

Update: Charter members are now able to participate in Sift Lounge.

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This is the grand-daddy of all the new features for v3.3. The idea was originally suggested by djsunkid at the Vancouver Sift Up as an alternative to the now extinct Collectives of old. This new feature is called Group Playlists and allows multiple users to collaborate over areas of similar interest. Here's an overview:

• A playlist owner can invite other users to join as group members
• Any playlist with one or more members is a Group Playlist
• Users can be invited to private playlists. This means you can have playlists only visible to a select few.
• The playlist owner can decide for each of their group members what powers they have over the playlist. The available abilities are: add videos, remove videos, delete playlist comments.

There is also a fun competitive side to Group Playlists. All public group playlists are ranked against one another based on the sum of votes received since each video was added to the playlist. The new default view for the "Playlists" tab is now the listing of all Group Playlists in order by best rank.

Update:
As noted above, by popular demand, the *dupeof invocation is now available to Diamond-250 members and up. Please keep in mind this is an extremely sensitive power that cannot be undone, so use it only in cases where you're absolutely certain it should be invoked.