First and foremost I'd like to thank everyone who has provided so much assistance in the recovery efforts after the 3/11 Siftpocalypse. It's really thanks to you all that we were able to get back on our feet in such a quick and confident fashion.

Now onto the business... As you're probably aware, one of the last major outstanding issues from our recovery has to do with video votes. Since we lost all voter data, what we did to return all video submitters their votes was have siftbot cast "placeholder" votes on all affected videos.

We were going to leave our repair at that, but it leaves a huge, ugly hole in the site, and since user Eklek came up with such a brilliant suggestion, we've gone ahead and implemented it.

Available now is a new *reclaimvote invocation. If you have voted on a video in the past but your vote has been turned into a placeholder siftbot vote, call the above invocation to turn one of those fake votes into a real vote of your own.

This is a special invocation and available to all users. It is only recognized by siftbot on a video that: 1) was affected by the siftpocalypse; 2) has any placeholder siftbot votes; and 3) you have not yet voted on. If you try to invoke on a video that does not meet any of those conditions, your invocation will be silently ignore (no error comment from siftbot to keep things tidy as lots of people will be invoking). But if you're successful you'll see a success comment on the video.

Please use *reclaimvote instead of up-voting any video that you have voted up in the past. Let us know here if there are any problems. Otherwise, thank Eklek for the great idea.

(Note that since we weren't able to restore any down-vote information, this invocation is strictly for up-votes.)

[edit]
Periodically, to reduce the comment bloat caused by these invocations, we'll delete all comments that contain in them nothing except the invocation "*reclaimvote" by itself. So, to allow your comment to be cleaned up later, when you use the invocation don't comment with anything more.