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

Changes are coming. Soon... very soon. [pets white lap cat]

Tell us how you really feel, Arvana.

That does seem like a good idea for the most part, my only concern is that it would make it way too hard to sift more interesting stuff that doesn't necessarily have a broad appeal, and that this place would officially become RonPaul/LOLcatSift.

Is there a graph/trend of vids published per day?

Raise the queue limit to 20? So what you're saying is that you don't want choggie to ever publish a video again? He publishes some of the more interesting stuff here, and I'd hate to see videos like his disappear. Sarzy's right; this place would become RonLOLcatSift.

Maybe you're just highballing with that number arvana, just so we can then "negotiate" a lower number that you really wanted in the first place. Fine, I'll play along. I say we lower the magic number to 2. Now let's negotiate a compromise by averaging those two numbers. That gives us 11. Deal?

Seriously, which one of these videos makes a greater contribution to the Sift: This one about life in the Roman empire, or this one about a machine gun briefcase? (Yes, they're both mine, only because I didn't want to drag anyone else's videos into this unwillingly.) Personally, I'm prouder of the Roman empire video, but that would never have made it under your proposed threshold. I think virtually all long videos would be a thing of the past as well.

However I do think cutting queue time would be a good start, but cutting it in half might be pretty drastic. I concede that it could work, but as others have suggested before maybe we should cut it down to 3 first before we try 2 day queues. And maybe a requeue limit might be good too, but I think we should try that only after a new queue time has been firmly established first. It's possible that I'm being too cautious, but I have feeling that if we adopted all three changes that you suggest at the same time there might be quite a few pissed sifters.

And *quality, because I do think changes need to be made. It's only the degree of change where we differ, arvana.

Awarding arvana with one star point for this contribution to Sift Talk - declared quality by CaptWillard.

L0LZ0RS!!!1!

I admit I was being deliberately provocative. Mainly because every time this issue has been raised by the Sift Gods lately, it's been shot down like a cold stone zeppelin with lead boots on Jupiter. And while I am very much in favour of involving the community in decision-making processes, I am against pandering to those with a vested interest in preventing change.

That, and I'm grumpy because a Bell Canada / Rogers Wireless snafu has left me without DSL for a week and I'm now surfing on 56k dialup. Eeeurgh!

By the way, I think the best method of shortening the queue time would be to tighten it by an hour every day for as long as necessary. For a Code Warrior of Lucky's gargantuan stature, that should be a snap.

The queue needs to shrink, not expand, to be more effective and efficient. My recommendations are: 1) set a 3 day time limit in queue, 2) allow requeue once per week for any of a user's posts (including discarded ones) without allowing an increase in number of queue slots for the user, and 3) possibly reduce the number of queue slots per user.

It might be worth considering changing how the limit on submissions is defined. Instead of allowing N posts at a time in the queue, you could allow N posts per day or per week.

Some of the stuff that went ballistic when it got sifted was very difficult for me to get the initial ten. I don't know what it is. I've given up on videos that eventually tons of other people liked.

More selectivity would be great, but selectivity based on what? The stuff I like the best is rarely the stuff that zooms out of the queue.

Another thing, we have a two tier system now, with a numerical ranking within the two buckets we have (sifted and not-sifted). The channels make for communities. Perhaps after you have contributed to the life of a channel enough (moderated it, voted for it, sifted to it), you can be part of the voting body to take videos to the next tier for that channel. that is, people who really really like the lolcats and cute doggies and such (of which I have posted some myself) get to vote on the creme de la creme de lolcat videos, and so on. I mean honestly, there are people who have the submission history to be more worth listening to with respect to world affairs for instance, and I care more about their opinions in that area, than that of random people who came by to vote for the boob video their buddy told them about.

I think requeue is hot because, as oxdottir points out, lots of vids that get requeued once, twice, even three times, end up doing great. I'm a fan of the "requeue survivors" playlist for the same reason - I haven't studied it but I imagine it has more than a few top 15s in it.

Also, there's an EASY way to automatically increase the limit to 11 or higher for vids you think are mediocre: queue downvotes.

One of the reasons the limit has stayed at 10 for ages (compared to the period where the limit went from 4 in small increements until hitting 8, and then settled at the current 10), is that with a larger community with more bronzes stars and up, you have a higher likelihood of the dreck getting downvoted to death, or at least to a point where the submitter gives up.

Having said that, if there's not enough people sifting the queue, the current limits 'fail' and tweaks are in fact necessary.

I remember when the queue could fit in 5 pages... then 10... now we're like at 20 pages if you have a lot of vids set per screen. Wow.

Dag: I want to see photographs of you with that white cat.