New Playlist URLs

posted by lucky760 1 decade 7 years 6 months 2 weeks ago • 173 views
As you may have noticed, over the past weeks the playlist feature has been exploding in popularity. With the growing number of playlists some Sifters have been getting creative with their playlist titles, which is perfectly fine, except that some such playlists started breaking as a result of unusual characters.



We have implemented a new address/URL system for playlists that is similar to that of normal video/ST posts. For most of you this change will not be too important, but there are some significant things to note.

  1. Any old links to your playlists are now invalid. However, the good news is that instead of getting a "404 Not Found" error, loading an old playlist address will load the user's playlist listing page.

  2. When you create a new playlist, the title you use will be used to create the URL to the playlist and that URL will not change even if you change the title again later. This is so that any links will not break again in the future.

  3. Most importantly, I think, there are no longer any restrictions about what type of characters are allowed in your playlist's name. Also, the length allowed for the titles has been increased by more than double.


This might make some people unhappy, but let me assure you it's much better for us to redo this from scratch now, early on in it's lifetime, instead of having much worse problems later. For a geek analogy, we'd rather be like Apple and force everyone to conform to better functionality than to be like Microsoft and keep piling buggy, error-prone "fixes" into an already inferior product.



Comments and problems go here.

6 Comments

winkler1 says...

Lucky-
Buglet: When I got to http://www.videosift.com/video/Scientists-singing-about-Intelligent-Design .. and then click on my name next to posted by, it links to http://www.videosift.com/video/user.php?login=winkler1 ... which is 404. Is there a way to search the source code for places which emit bad/old-style URLs with '.php' in them?

Think it was my suggestion for playlist URL's which was adopted. What the driver for the URL change? Googlejuice? Google loves keywords in URL's.

Jeff

lucky760 says...

Thanks for pointing that out, Jeff. I didn't catch that because you have to be a non-charter to have caught it. Should be fixed now.

Actually, I didn't even know that you suggested making this change. The primary reason we did it for playlists is that they were breaking due to the creative characters people started using. We implemented the video/ST post friendly-URL-ification mainly for the benefit from search engines and the positive psychological affect it has for people getting URLs emailed or really just seeing it anywhere. Having that up and running, it was only natural progression to do the same thing for the playlist URLs when we realized we really needed a serious fix for those bad boys.

Oh, to answer your other question, no, unfortunately there's no way to just search the source for old format URLs. In many places they are generated dynamically and sometimes it depends on the situation.

lucky760 says...

Yes. Go to the settings page for the playlist where you can change the name, etc., and in the bottom right corner there is a 'delete forever' button. It'll take two clicks, but should be close enough.

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