It's been a while since we've had an incremental update. The last one introduced Collectives. This one is not a huge update, but it is the lull before the big one. As some of you know - Lucky is polishing off changes on VideoSift 3.0. More about that later. Lets start with our new hosts.

Fora TV is a great resource for political content. They have deals with C-Span and other foundations to exclusively distribute their stuff.

LiveLeak is gaining a reputation as the place that hosts video footage that "they" don't want you to see. I don't need to tell you who "they" are. This is also the #1 most requested host bar none. Just a reminder, that some of LiveLeak's content would violate our no snuff rule, as they show pretty graphic death scenes.

DailyMotion is a site that inspires "what, it's not on the Sift already?" It's a big site, that somehow has fallen through the cracks. No more. I feel they have a more European flavour.

#1 requested site by Fedquip. ;-) They do have a good library of very siftable stuff - sure the player is not handsome - but it's a diamond in the rough.

New Privileges

We've added the *blog and *dead/*undead privileges for Silver star members. (yay) It gets a little tricky when we start to spread invocations among other star levels, so here's a document, Member Privileges to keep it all in order. (also in Useful Pages panel to your right ->)



Now, here's a doozy.



Rank has its privileges as we all know, and by the time you are diamond level, we feel that you have earned the community's trust. We are now allowing Diamond members to submit video from any host - not just those on our accepted host list - with a few restrictions:

- Must be Flash Video

- Must not autoload or autoplay

- Must not spawn pop-ups or do other annoying adevertising stuff.

- Must not be much bigger than our standard embed size

A word about VideoSift 3.0

As I mentioned above, Lucky has been toiling away in his code dungeon putting the polish on a completely new version of VideoSift. The changes in VideoSift 3.0 will be as radical as the changes from 1.0 to 2.0. The improvements are around 3 major areas:

- Streamlining the interface and code to withstand the onslaught of our increasing traffic. (VideoSift 2.x is popping bolts left and right)

- Some radical improvements to Collectives to make them more cohesive as subcommunities

- Fixing all the little crappy things that bug us about VS 2.0




Enjoy 2.5 and hang on for the New New VideoSift 3.0




Edit by Lucky:

As a late addition to version 2.5, you will see a new listing at the bottom of a video's page above the Related Videos section labeled "More Videos by [username]" that lists random videos also submitted by the same user. Queued videos have a higher priority in the random selection; this will help us all fend against queue rot and get more eyes on our other submissions.