Ditch those cheesy looking medals for top videos, this site looked fairly straight-forward and classy, but it'll turn into MySpace too quickly.

Bring back star points for comments, otherwise this idea will turn into every sift talk post becoming quality and everyone will cyclically pat each other on the back to make up for their otherwise worthy comments.

Giving sift talk posts less space per post on the main sift talk page will make it easier to navigate, and decreasing stickied posts' size even more will encourage posting. As of now, you can scroll like a billion lines to get past 3 stickies and someone's huge picture/epic post. Since the size of the summaries will be decreased, more people will want/need to enter into the post rather than just skim them as they do now.

As for the sift talk itself, part of the problem is that you place it between channels and blogs, two things which many people prolly don't click a lot. Maybe closer to the sifted/unsifted tabs might help as would the inclusion of the word FORUM, since lurkers who you wish to entice will be looking for easy and familiar 1n73rn375 terms.

Go check your pulse, kids, that's bipartisan contribution right there.

My first first thought is: Since when did CP420 become intelligent? Someone must have taken over his account.

My second first thought is: Dag likes to double-post.

Second thought: I like the idea of rewarding someone with a front page view. I know I didn't even notice the Sift Talk until I'd been here for a while.

Third Thought: Now that choggie is gone, can I have all of his star points? Seems like they're just sitting there, wasting away. It's a real shame, you know.

I think your problem lies in the sites UI. Lot of buttons up there. I just clicked Discussion for the first time. Need to be more concise.

Words like Unsifted don't mean anything to someone who hasnt been here before or just lurks. "Upcoming" or "Needs Votes" or something more, new user friendly.

Sift Talk doesn't mean anything to anyone either... Sift Forums might suit you better.

Just some ideas.

Random thought: Back in my lurking days, I never bothered to check what Sift Talk was all about. It wasn't until I registered and felt more involved in the community that I checked it out and found that a lot of action happens there. But still I get the feeling that Sift Talk is very often quite internal, and maybe not interesting to lurkers anyway. So the only reason I see to send quality posts to the front page with respect to lurkers is to advertise that VideoSift is a sympathetic community that might be worth signing up for. But it could also work in the opposite direction, by giving the impression that the community is a closed clique of people that is hard to get into. So I haven't made up my mind yet if it would be a curse or a blessing.

I think this is a pretty good idea, but I do have one suggestion: why not have one permanent space on the front page called something like "featured sift talk post", and have whichever is the most recent post to get a *.quality in there. That way you'll avoid too much clutter on the front page.

The Discussions link is also going to confuse. Ideally you should have one clear link which then presents the list of chats/discussions/topics and highlights the most active or interesting ones.

And then you have to decide if you want the existing format or go with a threaded forum module that I suspect more people are familiar with. I would be happier with that as it would generate more and varied discussions though I like the aesthetic appeal of Sift Talk.

Oh and to comment on your proposal it sounds just fine. Some sort of comment/news on the frontpage would hint at the community underpinning the site for lurkers.