Any chance the on-click "pop-out" comments window can be extended to allow submitting new comments without having to enter the post's main link? That'd speed it all up a tad I bet if it's codable... codeable... code-i-able.... .. workable.

T'would be nice, unfortunately that one's just not doable for technical reasons.

I'd like to commence the whining by whining about your spelling of "whining." Come on dag, you're an American abroad. Don't make us all look like idiots.

I already gave a few suggestions in an earlier Sift talk, so I won't rehash those here. However I have come up with a few more ideas to improve this site:

1. Make the default search include all videos in the Dead Pool. I think that the primary use for the search engine is to look for dupes, so the Dead Pool needs to be included.

2. When an an account is banned, automatically switch the video tags to just "banned" or "redacted", and then lock them out to prevent further changes, rather than allowing them to be switched to "has no dick" or "rapes dead sheep".

3. Create a new invocation called *destroy. I would like for this invocation to only be used:
a. For a video that's already been discarded, and
b. It can only by invoked by the user who originally submitted the video, that way no one else can mess with your discards.

Why have a *destroy invocation? Mainly to remove all the discarded dupes from the system. It cleans things up a bit, and also precludes the possibility of a discarded dupe being * saved by a well-wisher who didn't notice that the video was discarded for being a dupe.

4. Ditch V-Social from the Sweet Sixteen list of approved video hosts. Who really wants to sift a video about a marketing or promotional campaign? And I can't even find where their damn videos are anyway. I'm also inclined to suggest ditching Fora.tv because it also is rarely if ever used, but I do realize that they have some quality content so I'm not going to push hard for that. Possible replacements for either or both of these sites:

- Megavideo
- Funny or Die
- Veoh
- Glumbert
- eBaumsWorld
- Mojoflix
- SuperDeluxe

None of these sites are going anywhere any time soon, so I think they're acceptable.

5. Happy Hour from 5 - 7 pm every day.

That is all.

If there is any way I could work with you to make it so I can comment or post to blog or sifttalk from my iphone, I would be willing to do a fair amount. As I am posting from my iphone, the preview looks correct. It's only when I hit submit that it says I have a malformed comment. Perhaps you could make a special page for me to try on, and you could look at a log? At a special time?

The iphones are coming. I mean, I may be on the front of the wave now, but the bulk is coming. I won't be the only one who would like to use VS from an iphone. (Honestly, this is the only site I visit where I really can't do crap--I bank, enter grades, fill out surveys, etc. on other sites and it all works.)

Oh, and I am an American in America, and I use "whinging" all the time. No one has any trouble understanding me either.

I like a "destroy" invocation which kills the save invocation - I'd like the database to still have the vids available in a general search, just with the save ability nailed down to avoid accidental saves of re-submitted videos.

The reason to have them still available is so you can see how many times a single video died in queue.

Otherwise, excellent suggestion list. Especially happy hour.

I was speaking in jest, Cthulhu-cupcake, as I also know what whinging means. As an American-born American living in America, I've seen it used before too.

The number of unique views is intermittently counted incorrectly. I'm not sure what causes it, but occasionally views are not counted, and allow a video to have votes/views ratios > 1.0, or at least larger than it should have. This will probably be a hard bug to track down, and I'm not sure how many people are using that view option for the queue.

A more important improvement would be to change the restriction on requeue. I think being able to requeue a discarded video every N days would work well and not interfere with or detract from the use and benefit of saves. It would also allow the amount of time vids spend in the queue to be changed without complication - another potential big improvement.

From a design standpoint, the lists in the right column don't seem to have a coherent plan. I find I have to occasionally bounce around a few pages to find particular links that I don't use often. I think user customization of that column would be a massive improvement, but I suppose that's a 3.5 or 4.0 kind of feature request.

thumbs up for the (*)destroy invocation, too.

and there did seem to be consensus on allowing 100s to post from any host.

Only thing I can think of offhand is it might be nice to have the "your comments, threaded" option back again. We lost that sometime between the last version and this one. Makes keeping up with responses for threads we've posted in easier.

Rather than a *_destroy for dupes, why not make a *_merge or something that adds the votes from the new vid to the original and marks the old one as a duplicate linking it with the original?

^Even a better idea, jimnms. I'll second that. We (and by "we" I mean "they") just have to make sure that when the votes are merged that no duplicate votes, i.e., votes from the same person, are counted twice. Is this possible, admins? I'm no technogeek, so I don't know what's possible, what's impossible, and what's possible but REALLY hard to do. If it's not possible then I'd still like to see the *destroy invocation created.

Maybe let us reorder and customize the boxes on the right, so we could access the top 15 videos from SiftTalk, for example.

Maybe have comment voting actually worth something?

I.E.: A comment gets over 15 votes and it gets a star? Or maybe no matter how many votes, but five or more from goldies = star?

And one more small but possibly radical suggestion:

Instead of dating videos and comments with "published (or written) by so-and-so X months, X weeks, X days ago", could we simply use "published (or written) MM/DD/YY, military time, Pacific time"? I suggest Pacific time only because that's the time zone where the servers are physically located, correct? I realize that one of the many things that makes VideoSift different from other sites is it's fairly unique time stamp, so I know I might be messing with a time-honored tradition. Therefore I'm not going to go down in a blaze of glory to defend this idea. However, for me it's just easier when I see the date and time of publication rather than the time span that separates me from the event. Because I'm stupid.

How about having a *youregay invocation to throw at people you hate. Just kidding! You've already heard my beef with the advanced search thing just a few sift talk posts below this one, so I won't belabor the issue.

1. Proper, constantly promised and never delivered Stats Screen.

2. All Comments -> Threaded view is gone, I really liked that featured, especially following discussions.

3. The improved way of telling apart dupes as mentioned by others, so many times... OMFG cool video! Search! Nothing! Discard post! Post! OMFG ITS A DUPE... *smash computer screen*

Even though the vox populi was meh on this one, I have to bring this up. Why? Because I'm an asshole. This is something I'd like to see be a part of 3.1, and I hope Lucky doesn't become Fucky by smacking my ass down with the holy "That shit is too technically fucked, asshole" message, but here it is:

http://www.videosift.com/talk/Searching-before-video-vubmission-is-a-crap-shoot

I support deadpool vids showing up in searches, and would also like to offer a suggestion.

How about you change the views logged for a video to just the member views? It gives a much more realistic look at how the video has fared, since it only counts the views that could possibly vote for the video at all. This'll bring the viewed numbers on the videos down, but should massively bring up the views/votes ratio, which has been a rather depressing thing to see lately (just look at any of the top fifteen new videos).

Whem im looking in the Top Sifts tab. Looking at all the videos (791 pgs), and I want to go to page 300. It takes forever. You can only jump ten or so pgs at a time. They dont exactly load fast either.

How about *findthumb actually works

How about I can submit even though its not VS kiddy approved VS embedabble

How about you pay us since we submit content that generates views to your site.

Not sure why people are reporting threaded comment listings as gone. They are all there and in working order. Anyone else not seeing them?

^I'm not even sure what you're referring to.

MarineGunrock: ^I'm not even sure what you're referring to.

drattus: it might be nice to have the "your comments, threaded" option back again.
Farhad2000: 2. All Comments -> Threaded view is gone

Lucky, all comments threaded is there but we lost the your comments threaded option in the last upgrade, unless I'm missing it somewhere. All comments I see fine but that's a lot to wade through to see if I got any replies to the specific threads I might have posted in the day before. We used to have the your comments threaded option too unless I've lost my mind somewhere. Always possible I suppose

On edit, more than possible. It's there, when I'd tried it a while back I must have forgot the thread on top and assumed it was the full listing. Early senility setting in.

That's still there. It's an option in the sidebar drop-down box on the "your recent comments" page.

E.g., here's yours: http://www.videosift.com/usercomments/drattus?sel=allth

Maybe let us reorder and customize the boxes on the right, so we could access the top 15 videos from SiftTalk, for example.

Drag and drop reorganization, through Ajax a la Facebook application list, would be hugely useful, as doing it by any other method would be complicated at best for regular sifters and impossibly difficult for newbies.

Also, not to beat a dead horse, but it would be nice if another look could be taken at comment voting, to either make it have some weight or to remove it altogether.

I'm against removing the time stamping saying how long ago something was published, but it might be nice to include an actual date alongside the current stamp.

I know you're talking about comment threading, but is that a la Gmail replies?

SUGGESTIONS:

Fix the freaking comments list so that "Your Comments" isn't in some bizarro world separate drop-down down and list. WHy the hell can't you have ONE LIST of sorting options like it originally used to be?

I would like to see your profile page look more like a response center. You do this everywhere but the profile page. It should have your last 10 comments (threaded), any comments posted to your last 5 posted videos, profile comments, etc.

It should not take 4 clicks (ie. My Profile -> published -> expand video's comments) IT should already be there for say, anything newer than a week old?




Also why not allow Recommends / Invites inside videosift, like a list of "Check this out" videos that users could send within Videosift. I'd rahter they have their own list and interface, then just be simple comments left in my profile.

>> WHy the hell can't you have ONE LIST of sorting options like it originally used to be?
Because there needs to be a page to display a specific user's comments. Such functionality works very differently than the main listing for everyone's comments.

>> Also why not allow Recommends / Invites inside videosift, like a list of "Check this out" videos that users could send within Videosift.
I guess one thought on this is that people could easily abuse such a thing and just go around spamming everyone to check out their own videos. Of course if there was a friends-like feature, you might be able to send suggestions to people in your friends list, but as many recall that idea was shot down, drowned, dismembered, and barbecued.

Yeah, I think it's fine how it is now with recommending videos. If I see something I like, or am fishing for upvotes on my own vid , I just comment/IM a buddy with the link, and this system works without trouble.

(for the record, it's mainly spamming them with links to videos I found hilarious/retarded/etc, and rarely whoring out my own sifts).

I think we should invest our time building up our strength so that we can invade Poland. I hear that's a pretty trendy thing to do.

And VS 3.1 needs to have more boobs.

I'd like this for my birthday

It's not my birthday though.

I would like to see certain functions be more channel specific (Some of which I have asked for in the past):

Playlists (Definitely have asked for this before)- Would be useful to help organize things. Either the owner can add playlists to it (like we used to be able to do with collectives) or the playlist creator can append their own somehow and then the group of them can then be managed by the channel manager (ie. removed from the channel, ordered, etc).

Video Tag Cloud- Would also be good for organizing the videos within a channel... and it would also be interesting to see the clouds generated for the various channels as the tags used and their frequency would be specific to the content.

Top Users- Would be nice to see who the main patrons and contributors of a channel are, much like we used to have with the collectives.

Recent Comments- Keep these specific to the channel, so monitoring the chatter related to a specific topic is easier.

Top Rated New Comments- Would also be nice if these were channel specific when viewed from the channel's main page, because this would highlight particularly active threads within the channel and sticking to the subject matter.

As the channels stand now they are about half-way to really, in my mind, being completely content specific channels. It would be great if you guys could take it the rest of the way so that when a viewer is actually viewing a channel, all the content is specific to that subject matter.

In keeping with that I'd like the removal of the Link Partnership Feeds from within the channels... because really, it seems odd to have links to completely non-related, and often seldom updated material within a subject specific channel... its tolerable for the main area of the Sift, but I'd like to see the channels function better as content specific realms.

And yes, I agree with Lucky that a 'video recommend' feature would likely get abused by people trying to promote their sifts by whoring them out to people... there is already enough of this going on via profile comments to suggest that this would be readily abused and extremely annoying.

^ Thats good stuff. Now I'd like that for my birthday too.

I'll try not get hyper and fall into a tree if i get to unwrap it

I miss the old collective system, though I was around barely long enough to really experience it much.

make search better
somehow make people tag better, including things in the title
allow searching for long vids only (or tell me how if i missed it)
free beer for all gold stars

Reverse the sense of channel filtering. Instead of removing all videos that appear in a given channel, show all videos in the channels we select (everything selected by default).

Oh, and we REALLY need a "quote this comment" reply option and link-insertion button, it's very annoying to have to copy and paste comments just so people know who I'm replying to, or to format links by hand. For that matter, there should be an option to display basic text formatting buttons.

^ you missed it. Go to advanced search. The second box from the bottom allows you to filter by ONLY Long videos or to exclude them if you wish. Default is to search everything.

- improve search
- allow more tags
- invade Poland

god... why can't you leave poland alone?... after all its home to our only sister site!

Recent "top" downvoted comments

1) "videos being viewed right now" might be disposable.
As the traffic increases, it becomes irrelevant to the point of being "here's some random videos, yay" ...that some random people happen to be watching... It might be worth extending the "new sift-talk posts" panel to include all channel sift-talk posts in place of the "videos being viewed right now."

2) With everyone on broadband, we might up the default vids/page to 20 and top 15 to top 20. This can also allow the additional channel Sift-talk posts in the side-bar.

3) I wouldn't mind giving the "diamonds" the ability to * destroy a vid from the deadpool if it is obviously one of those ones that will never come back, e.g. simpsons or anything comedy central. We don't need to continually seek ways to avoid the law and their copyright permissions to keep 1 minute videos circulating on the sift "illegally." If "destroyed," they're gone from the deadpool and people can re-submit them anyway if the legal issues get sorted out in the future.

Encouraging more commenting and Sift-talk participation might make the community more vocal. For now, we have a very limited group of regular vocal posters. As much as I enjoy the "small group" mentality, it doesn't support dissension very well. I guess I'm concerned about the sift just becoming another marginal and unimportant one-sided group-think forum. If everyone thinks the same way and they all only let certain vids through, then it's not what it seems it was meant to be and it loses HALF its potential audience. It'll just be another Drudge or Moveon. Encouraging commenting by some means might incite some better 2-sided discussions.

Also, Where are we advertising? The sifters have proven willing to put some money into the site. Should we consider putting more of the word out so we can draw some new visitors? Heck, Newgrounds did it by giving out stickers to people willing to post them on their campuses. Can we come up with some ideas to plaster our areas of influence with Videosift ads (other than our fantastic T's)?
Let's think of new ways to gather new traffic. If it means Google Ads, how much does that cost? If it means stickers for colleges, what will that run per hundred? How about widgets for bloggers' web-pages: "Top 10 videosift videos today" widget? etc. etc. Where are we linked back? Have we ever sought actual MSM attention?... Neatorama recently got a spot on CNN online... How can we venture into that realm that is the top 100 visited websites?
We are the youtube sifted to finer purity. If youtube can wind up on the mainstream news, we can too.
Allies such as Neatorama and such will also be valuable in that sort of outreach. We should reach out to the other major blogs that each of us knows of to spread.

Anyway, a community-wide ad-campaign would obviously benefit. We have enough dedicated contributers to initiate more widespread advertisement to blogs and independent free advertisement.

We need to keep "Videos being viewed right now"
Very often, that is how I view new videos.

Also, the ability to *destroy one's own stuff.

Perhaps *fumigate would be a better invocation for purging deadpool rubbish than *destroy, MG. heh. I'd dig that. Reserve *destroy for self-destruction to the nethers rather than to the discard pile. or maybe *suicide for self-destruction of a video?!?

I would like it if there was a chat room that allows IM.

1. I wish there was one place I could go to learn how to ...

a. Make this page http://latenight.videosift.com/
look more like this page http://waronterror.videosift.com/channels

b. Make this > http://latenight.videosift.com/ <
look like > My channel < (of course you could click on them both to get to my channel)

c. learn how to utilize this..
Custom Profile Styles:
view the default charter CSS file
Upload new CSS file:

d. Understand how to utilize this fully - http://blog.videosift.com/blogpost


2. I would also like the ability or option to view, Top Users, Playlists and channels in a simple list with minimal info but max quanity. One page with minimal scrolling.

there MUST be a difference between "discarded because it is shit, snuff, dupe" and "discarded because my queue was full or it just didn't get enough votes and i would like it to be saved"

this is fundamental.
at the moment the "discarded" category is a jumble and choosing stuff to save is hard.

i like the idea of *destroy.

oh and do something so that the title isn't more important than the video. i don't know what, but do something, because at the moment this is blatantly "titlesift".

and i totally don't understand * requeue.

many in the top 15 needed requeuing. why? find out, and sort it out.

also i am requeuing a shit video repeatedly at the moment and eventually it will escape the queue. that's weird.

where's my "favourite users" list? i can't be doin with all that RSS rubbish.

ability to bookmark posts i commented on would be simple and effective.

problem at the moment is the bookmark button is at the top, and when i comment i am at the bottom.

just need a little tickbox, either a general setting in my profile or a tickbox for each time i comment. u can have it unticked by default if u like.

and about searching for "long" i mean without a keyword. i just want e.g. all long videos in comedy channel in reverse date order, etc. right now i search for "e" or "the" and that's silly.

I love the idea about of having a customizable Ajax page, we could add a tab for 'My VS'. Let users add CSS and modules like favorite sifters or threads via RSS, And if we can have drag and drop, we'll definitely need three columns.

Pretty please?

How about this? Keep the current queued videos amount the same, but allow a sort of sub-queue. That way you wont have to discard one of your currently queued videos, but you can be sure that no one else can queue what you hope to queue once your queued list opens a slot.
I apologize if this confused any one, so ill try to break it down.

I can have 3 videos queued, and in the Unsifted Section on VS. But under those i can have say, 2 or 3 more videos in my own personal queue. And once unsifted video #1 gets sifted, sub-queue video #1 moves up onto my queued list and the unsifted section of VS.

It might look something like this:

Arsenault185's queued videos:
1. ok video a. 7 votes
2. Decent video b. 4 votes
3. Great video c. 2 votes

Sub-queue:
1. totally kick ass video with *awesomesauce on it a.
2. Almost as good video b.

Then once ok video a gets out of the unsifted queue, the #1 video in the sub-queue moves up. And while a video is in the sub-queue, sifty treats it like a sifted video, to prevent others from sifting it. does this make sense to anyone?

Oh and just a small thing - Above the submit comment box, it says "possible *invocations" How about if that actually reflected the users status and channel? i.e. I'm a Bronze star and it lists "discard • sticky • unsticky • quality • nochannel" Where is should list "dead • notdead." Also, it should only give you what will work based on the channel, (sift talk or video comments. It kinda looks unorganized to have the site tell me I can * nochannel this thread.

arsenault, the ones you can do are in black, the ones you can't are grey.

How about we make the invocations clickable? Typing up requeue is always a bitch, lol.

arsenault, would i be able to cast a vote for the individual sub-queue video or have to wait until it gets queued?
and would it be so terrible if bronze star members or higher had say 5 vids on queue? in the end it's all down to sifter votes anyway. maybe we could raise the bar to 12 votes?

When we submit a video, give us an option to automatically *requeue it before it expires. And have an easily accessible list of smilies.

No, no vote casting for subqueues, basically its just puts a hold on the video, so you can be sure that you sift it, even when your queue is full.

I think that'd take a lot of fun out of things, personally.

Subqueue is a really Bad Idea to me, and doesn't work. If you find extra things to submit, keep a list. VS is not an MMO with an auto grinding macro system to gain you Stars while you sleep and work.

I've finished adding my Advanced Search 101 as quite a few things are possible already that have been asked for here (like searching for vids WITHOUT a search term like MINK was asking for). Please rant at it and add your own tricks.

My wish list:

A: A googleesque "did you mean?" search spelling corrector, which would help a great deal in avoiding dupes in pre-submission searches,

and,

2: The little word processor type buttons in the submit comment box for italics, bold and such so I can look like I know what i'm doing even though i'm HTML deficient.

I'm not harping. I'm constantly impressed with the evolution of this site. Cheers all.

^ Use fire fox. on the search submissions box right click, and select "Spell check this field" Joy

I'd also like to add that this is why VideoSift is the best damned community on the net. The admins actually ask the user what they would like to see with changes, and don't have an "I'm the admin, so you can STFU attitude." Except for Dag. He's an ass.

Cheers.

Good tip, thanks. But I'm looking for something that will help me find if "Ramachandran" has been submitted yet. And that doesn't help if there's a spelling mistake in a posted video's title or tags.

Allow users to hide videos they have viewed in the queue! Or, allow users to cast a "no-vote", and the 'Hide videos you have voted on' option will do the same thing.

Ugh. No "Top Downvoted Videos"!.. do we really want to give quantummushroom, billOreilly, rotty and other consistently obnoxious personages their own special soapbox???

69 posts that I'm not going to read through and see if my grouse is one of. In the sidebar with "top 15 sifts" etc, it would be a nice feature if the little thumbnail beside the link were linked as well.

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

Thanks everyone. What an amazing amount of useful feedback.

I can't say that we'll be able implement a lot of these suggestions - but we will consider them all and some undoubtedly will be. If not in this release- then down the road.

We'll go through them all and put them in 3 categories:
"Yes!", "No!" and "future release"

Feel free to continue adding suggestions but I'm *unstickying.

Unstickying this post from the top of Sift Talk - unsticky requested by dag.

Ooh! Ooh! What if in the top 15 we had a fancy roll-over feature so the thumbnail gets bigger when you roll over it?

Make it Safari compatible. There are features that I lost in 3.0 that I would like to use again.

hmmm, how could I have missed this Sift Talk post. Must have been the holidays and the aftermath of that Anyways. I made a Sift Talk post about a suggestion Idea voting on Sift Talk

Here are my suggestions, ready to print out for the code ninjas in the bat cave:

- a validate embed code button somewhere that is always accessible, not just when your queue is full
- ability in user backend to set a default for "comment emails" and "status emails" on submit page
- an automatic alert for videos posted with tags that show in "favourite tags" in profile
- a "more" button for lengthy sifttalk posts (siftographies, top 100 list... etc)

I also second these previous suggestions:

- a *destroy invocation to permanently delete a video
- a stats page
- a "quote comment" button
- a possibility for "idea voting" (or polls tool)