Comment system needs an overhaul.

We should be able to sort comments. Top rated, lowest rated, oldest, newest, ect.

Also, nesting comments would be better for carrying out a discourse uninterrupted by what others are saying. There needs to be flow in the threads. The whole "quote this and then respond" thing takes up too much room. Nesting would be much more direct.

This last one may be unpopular, but comments below a rating threshold should be hidden. I realize this may censor those with different opinions, but I believe the pros outweigh the cons. It's a necessary evil.

Also, it seems to me there are far too many crutches handed out when trying to get something sifted. We have "unsifted," "PQs," and "Beggar's Canyon." It's too much.

I don't think videos should be aloud to be promoted an infinite amount of times till they're sifted.

Neither do I think videos should be aloud to languish indefinitely in a PQ.

PQs need to have a limited capacity and a minimum vote threshold. They should also be aloud to be begged only once (If at all - I see no reason to have both a PQ and a Beggar's Canyon. One or the other, IMO).

I disagree with Edeot on the PQs. I like them the way they are ENTIRELY. It gives a video not only a chance to get through, but also the eternal presence that allows them to be found by search.

I've seen too many of them languish in a pq for months and then SLAM out of it to get tons of votes once it gets its #10 finally. The PQ is as much a bulletin board as it is a grave yard, if not more.

I also think we don't need to nest comments. It has never really been a problem for us that we have too many comments to understand the flow, except for rare, very controversial subjects. Most of the time, people communicate just fine.

I am against adding restrictions to Personal Queues.

Over the three years of the Sift existence, we've known many videos that were not appreciated at first glance.

One suggestion I would like to make is a tab for Personal Queues. And with that I'd suggest having the same sorting options available in the Sifted and Unsifted areas.

Also I suggest having the same sorting abilities within the context of an individual sifter's Personal Queue.

I support helping sifters sift the Personal Queues more easily.

^PQs can already be easily sorted, even by individual. For example, if I wanted to find all the Comedy videos in dotdude's queue, the search would look like this:

http://www.videosift.com/search?q=&t=v&u=dotdude&s[]=r&o=&c[]=50&vmin=&vmax=&sh=&l=&n=&b=&submit=Search

I could even sort them by votes, if I wanted:

http://www.videosift.com/search?q=&t=v&u=dotdude&s[]=r&o=hivotes&c[]=50&vmin=&vmax=&sh=&l=&n=&b=&submit=Search

You can filter even more by using search terms and additional channels.

I've already given my suggestion for how to handle PQueues, and it addresses nearly every concern brought up here. There is no need for a separate PQ. Let them stay unsifted, and add a cutoff date option to the Unsifted page, defaulting at 2 days (the current unsifted cutoff).

The votes/views ratio sorting doesn't work nearly as well as I'd hoped, primarily because most people don't actually watch that many videos. It might be better to change the criteria for what constitutes a unique view to being when the video is included on a list page, instead of opened up on its own.

The idea behind the votes/views ratio was that most videos would have a lot of views, and the difference between the ratios for different videos would be much smaller. So, instead of having videos with ratios like 6/5, 4/7, 3/5, etc., the ratios would look more like 6/45, 4/54, 3/25. That kind of distribution will prevent videos from permanently disappearing so quickly into the back pages of the Unsifted section. The first page or two of the Unsifted section will be constantly churning.

The various account options for hiding NSFW, receiving emails, etc., could be cleaned up. There are related options that are all over the place. Having a single page for managing all of your account options would be much nicer.

I have another comprehensive idea for channels and filters, but I don't have time to write it all out just now. I've mentioned parts of it before. The basics include getting rid of "top level" channels like Comedy, Music, Politics, etc, and making those predefined tags. The remaining channels are then subscribed to like we used to do with Collectives. I'll add more to this later when I get a chance.

button-like (but still comment-text-based) invocations and clickable drop-down channel invocations list.

As edeot already mentioned, I also believe nested comments would be great. The threads would be more interesting and/or entertaining if this were available. Other ideas:

1. I've said it a hundred times before, but it bears repeating: More video hosts. Here are some solid hosts that have had a presence on the internet for over a couple of years already:

- FunnyOrDie
- 5MinLife
- blip.tv
- MyVideo.de - Sure, it's a German-language host, but they already have many videos here.
- Current TV
- Reuters - hopefully that will encourage more world news videos

BTW, none of those are region-blocked

2. Fix Vimeo and CollegeHumor so that sub-Gold members can post videos. It's my understanding that they're unable to post videos from them right now.

3. Replace the iFilm logo with Spike TV, because that's what iFilm became well over a year ago. Go ahead and type in 'www.ifilm.com' and see what happens. iFilm is no más. And then fix it so that sub-Gold members can embed their videos.

4. Thumbnails, thumbnails, thumbnails! I'm not talking about thumbnails for every video site under the sun; just give us thumbnail pictures for all of our approved hosts. Right now none of these approved hosts have thumbnail pictures:

- Google
- The Onion
- VideoJug
- Spike TV (formerly iFilm)
- MySpace
- Yahoo!
- DailyMotion
- NBC
- MTV Music
- Comedy Central
- Hulu
- Game Trailers
- Veoh

In fact we only have seven out of the 20 approved hosts that have thumbnail pics. Those are CollegeHumor, YouTube, Metacafe, Vimeo, Break, Revver, and LiveLeak. If you want people to post from more approved sites, I think you need to give us more thumbnail pics. They usually boost vote tallies, as most experienced members already know.

BTW, both Atom Films and Comedy Central use the MTV Music player, so if you can get thumbnail pics for MTV Music videos then you should be able to do the same for Atom Films and Comedy Central, which are both owned by Viacom. Viacom also owns Spike TV, but they still use a different player than the others I just mentioned.

5. Get rid of both the hobbling and Siftquisition features. Like I said before, they're good ideas in theory, but in practice they've done more harm than good.

6. Give us the option to block any user from commenting on our profile pages. This should hopefully lead to less squabbling.

7. Put up all the unassigned channels for bid, going to the members with the most star points. We have too many unassigned channels, and many of those get misused because of this.

8. Provided it doesn't significantly increase bandwidth or other operational costs, give us a game room. The membership was in favor of it, so make it so, but ONLY if it doesn't increase your costs significantly.

9. Crown members get the privilege of prima noctis with probationary members, as God has ordained it our right.

__/\__
\ oO /  An upgrade for the Lounge so that it doesn't freeze.
/_/\_\

- Please add a blocked flag (checkbox)
- Thumbnails! Many videos are at a disadvantage due to lack of thumbnails.

Oh yeah, one more thing: Fix the 'Average Votes Per Video' formula. Right now it is not working right because it isn't taking the number of PQ videos into account. I'll give you an example by using the account of mas8705, only because I want to use an account with relatively static numbers.

Currently mas8705's Average Votes Per Video is 28.64. By doing the math, I can tell that the formula didn't include PQ videos, because his total Votes Received count (6788) divided by his Sifted Videos (237) equals exactly 28.64 votes/video. Now remember he received a total of 6788 votes for ALL of his videos, including the ones in his PQ. Therefore the Average Votes Per Video formula should look like this:

Total Votes/(Sifted videos + Unsifted videos + PQ videos) = Average Votes Per Video

If we were to plug in numbers from mas8705's account, it would look like this:

6788 votes/(237 Sifted videos + 0 Unsifted videos + 247 PQ videos) = 14.02 votes/video

As you can see, this makes a HUGE difference in the Average Votes Per Video number. If we're going to use this stat, then it needs to be done right.

Crowns to be able to create sockpuppet accounts for fun? But without voting and sifting abilities. Wouldn't that be a lot of fun?! No? Damn.

5. Get rid of both the hobbling and Siftquisition features. Like I said before, they're good ideas in theory, but in practice they've done more harm than good.

I couldn't agree more. If you only change one thing it would be this.

Find some clever cheap way to distribute the computing load...

As everyone, I like the PQueue the way it is but what about the Pqueues from abandoned accounts? Those videos are NEVER getting out because no one has an invested interest on seeing them sifted.

Inactive accounts shouldn't hold onto it's PQueues after a certain date...

I would like to see a better user interface for viewing the videos. some way we can see a page of thumbnails, like 3-4 across and 20 down in a big grid...
See: http://www.photos.com/en/search/index

Sometimes I'd like to be able to just browse lots of old stuff without it being fed to me in a liner format. I know we can do searches, but it's still very linier, and we already have to know what we are looking for.

And let's be honest, sometimes the average web surfer just wants to be entertained as they go. They don't want to fill out a huge form, that's too much like work. (though the search is great when we need it.)

>> ^Krupo:
Find some clever cheap way to distribute the computing load...


x2. This is my #1 concern.

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

What do you mean by adding a blocked flag - something beyond what we have now, I'm assuming?


>> ^mauz15:
- Please add a blocked flag
- Thumbnails! Many videos are at a disadvantage due to lack of thumbnails.

>> ^dag:
What do you mean by adding a blocked flag - something beyond what we have now, I'm assuming?

>> ^mauz15:
- Please add a blocked flag



I think mauz15 accidentally added the "l". He's filled with hate, you know?

>> ^dag:
What do you mean by adding a blocked flag - something beyond what we have now, I'm assuming?

>> ^mauz15:
- Please add a blocked flag
- Thumbnails! Many videos are at a disadvantage due to lack of thumbnails.



Sorry, I should have phrased that better. I mean a blocked checkbox in the submission process. Just like we have a brief, long, and NSFW checkbox in the submission, and modify video details pages.

make everything perfect

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

I just made a note. Got it.

>> ^deputydog:
make everything perfect

I agree with the queue comments above.

The idea would be this. All unsifted videos are in the same queue. Remove beggars, pqueues, etc.

You could either have a ribbon like the top15 status thing to denote a "beg" or "expired" unsifted video. The default Unsifted page would only show videos up to a certain date (like 3 days). You have the option to sort the unsifted by votes/views/date and also another option to only show recent/one week/one month/ ALL videos. Likewise on a person's profile page will be a link to auto-search unsifted by username.

I've said it before, but CLEAN up the navigation.

You have like 15 tabs and I don't even know what some of them do... You have Discussions, Channels, Playlists... Unsifted, Beggars...

It should be much cleaner navigation.
Sifted/Unsifted/Top Videos/Top Comments/Blog

Maybe a tab for Playlists... But make Channels appear to be a mega-playlist, but same display as what a playlist is.

Also, the auto-fill-in submit thing at least for YouTube would be nice. Lucky knows what I mean. And towards that end, it would be nice to auto-scrape tags from YouTube and also the time/length of videos. Please add this one extra database field for video length. I know it is missing from all existing videos, but it could be a nice feature. Also you can then do away with long/brief nonsense.

When did our ability to embed images disappear?

<embed src="http://i176.photobucket.com/albums/w186/Duignan1987/shit.jpg">

1. You cannot DOWNVOTE more than one video in a set time from the same person, so to stop biased downvotes.

^ That's because your queue is terrible, so stop whining.

Kronos had a lot of good points. I would also like to see siftquistions disappear and thumbnails for more video hosts (especially google and dailymotion).

^It could be a complete coincidence that he just happened to downvote my entire queue because it's terrible, or maybe he did so out of spite for whatever reason?

Either way apparently the reason for his downvoting spree is moot because 187rasch should be the guiding voice in that matter. If that's the case, cool. I know a lot of queues on here that could use a huge downvote spree. Who's gonna set that precedent?

Sign me up for nested comment threads. Besides cleaning up the comment space it also encourages more discussion. Also get rid of the horrid siftquisition feature.

Going along with the idea that you want to keep this a community-based site (not letting YouTards invade), here are a few conservative and most likely unpopular thoughts for the Sift...

I'll mention this first, since, surprisingly to me, it seems to be a contentious subject. Keep PQueues as they are. They give identity to members, sometimes moreso than sifted videos. Most are not sifted because of the time posted, number of views, number of buddies that check your PQ.

Set the default for the front page back to "Newness." The mentality of the Sift has changed. I've read complaints from people saying the quality of sifted videos has gone down, and the "Hotness" tag was supposedly the remedy. The only thing that has accomplished, from my POV, is an acceleration of dumb videos being upvoted. Whether that is because of voting cliques or not, catchy titles or not, doesn't matter.

Force people to "sift" through their own personal preference of videos. This ensures a genuine appreciation for videos that are posted, with no bias based on what other people like. While going through the "Hotness" page lets you know what has been upvoted in the past half-day or so, it's barely a recognition of the quality videos that are out there. The first few are usually good, but once you get to the second page, videos with only 2, 3, or 4 votes defeat the purpose. It perplexes me sometimes when a day-old video with 2 votes can appear on the "Hot" list, and this happens often.

On the flip-side, videos that aren't recognized right away for the same factors (no 'catchy' title, not posted at 'rush hour', long videos) are ignored. I've used "Newness" all the time and the majority of them are now only getting 10-15 votes max. I'm not speaking out about my own videos - I couldn't care less about how many votes my random shit gets - but I HAVE noticed that if any of mine make the "Hot" list, they are a sure thing to get sifted, whether they are better quality than the others or not. It all depends on how many votes are received in a certain amount of time.

Some people don't know the 'hot' times to post videos and we shouldn't have to care about that. To make it fair for everyone, both the Front Page and Unsifted should be set to the "Newness" or "newest queue date" factor. If something is posted during a 'slow' time, it will get more exposure, and vice-versa. Let the people do the math (votes per view) in their own head if they want to - or, of course, use them as a secondary option.

I think this back-to-basics approach would help the Sift, in fairness both to new Sifters (who don't have cliques) and old Sifters (who think the place is going rotten with 'strategic, agenda-driven' cliques).

Shit, I didn't think this post would end up so long. Basically... present everything in newest order posted as the default, forcing people (and mostly newbs who haven't figured out how to customize) to search through and upvote things based on their own principles and what they like/dislike. The "Hotness" factor is flawed in both the Sifted and Unsifted sections.

Crap, this is too long. Nobody's gonna read it. Free promote to anyone who made it this far.

>> ^blankfist:
^It could be a complete coincidence that he just happened to downvote my entire queue because it's terrible, or maybe he did so out of spite for whatever reason?
Either way apparently the reason for his downvoting spree is moot because 187rasch should be the guiding voice in that matter. If that's the case, cool. I know a lot of queues on here that could use a huge downvote spree. Who's gonna set that precedent?


Not at all, blanky. Actually, it was pure coincidence. I've decided to be a little more aggressive with my downvotes, which I think everyone should, and that started tonight... beginning with the Unsifted stuff, then moving on to viewing all the top sifts from the last month and downvoted the ones I think are lame, for my own personal reasons. Check it out for yourself - all of the downvotes are pretty random as far as users go.

Simple as that; no hard feelings. I've upvoted plenty of your stuff and have even promoted some.

Nested comments are a miserable, pustulant abomination; unreadable and with no place in civilised discourse.

???

Power up playlists. Make them searchable, give them metadata so I can find one on a given subject (there must be zillions). This would also prevent me making one that's already covered.

First things first.

MONEY MONEY MONEY MONEY MONEY.

How will you guys, no no. How will 'WE' survive without income!!!

There has to be a better way to earn money. How about putting in an advertisement in middle of the sift list? Or siftbot (ahem, graterbot) automatically uploading an advertisement video into the system. And you can vote on it too haha!

Personally I wouldn't mind watching advertisements from Cable channels such as the national geographic or the travel channel. Hell, we already have a few videos like this circulating around in the sift list.

Don't think it would be that much of a nuisance as long as we don't have automatic pop-ups jumping out randomly.

That limits us to television advertisements. But hell, better than nothing. And we are a video community after all. So it goes with the theme, no?

And though I've never used a podcast, this also has something to do with web content videos as well, no?

Hopefully we could use these forms of media to our advantage.

remember, ads ads, money money!!

^Good point. I mentioned this a long time ago. I think charter members should see ads.

Restrictions on PQ. (Only to prevent the massive ones, like max 100 videos in a PQ or something)

An easy way to browse PQs. Right now you have to go into each users individual PQ or search for a specific subject. That sucks! Could we get a Personal Queues Tab that sorted by oldest post that we have not voted for yet?

Remove beg and beggar's canyon, the PQ browser above should be sufficient and now that we can promote our own stuff anyway, we can just do that.

Nested comments could be good IF they are done right. Make a few public tests of them first, so we can agree on them.

Be able to mark a video as read, but not voted on. If we actively want to abstain from voting, it would be great to be able to give a visual cue on later browsing. I mean, we could make the abstain-votes not be permanently locked, so that we can unlock them and make a vote later, if we change our minds?

Sorting users by average votes could be fun. It's impossible to get an overview of now.

If you want to "hide" comments with low vote count, then take a look at what they do on wowhead - just minimize them, so they can always be opened if one wants to. And I think they could be minimized much more than what ignored posts are now.

A way to see if a user is inactive. Maybe we could keep track of the user's latest activity (vote, comment etc.) and make a little line on his user page "Member was last active on bleh" If a member has been inactive for like a year, we can make adjustments to how his videos are handled concerning *dead and fixes, for instance.

Bring back star powers (or other good reward) from comments in some form. We've seen just how utterly useless "power points" are in the fact that i've lost about 5 of them since the great sift-street crash, and i'm sure others have lost more. And who cares?

I never use them, i never look at them, i couldn't care less about them. Because of this i've stopped posting 90% of comments that normally i would post. I've stopped even trying to post quality comments since i was basically told "Your input is of no value here." This website discarded any quality input i had to give when they made this change.

People will say "This is a video posting website not a forum/comment posting website!!" - but i'll tell you this. You can find videos ANYWHERE, i don't think we're exceptional in that way. But you can't find the videosift community anywhere, and that's why i come here.

Perhaps allowing some way for priveliged-enough people to tag a COMMENT as "quality" and award a star point? This way, at least, people don't automatically get a star point for posting "OBAMA IS GREAT WOOOO CHANGE!" but the really genuinely good comments can get you somewhere.

^Personally I like to comment because I feel others might benefit/enjoy it, not because I'm going to get a power or star point.

And this is a video posting site. If there's a better aggregator out there then link to it.

re generating money. How about allowing Siftbot to be sponsored?

Self promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued - promote requested by original submitter rasch187.

Sponsored by Bob's World of Sandals.

This is a small thing, but when the video description is too long to fit in the summary, so that you have to click "more inside", i'd like to be able to read the whole description while still watching the video. Just make it magically appear with some javascript, like the comments are doing already.

I too think the PQs should also be sacred ground although the idea of a tab to help sort them or be able to hide the ones that you already voted for, is a great idea. Sagemind's idea about abandoned accounts is a valid one. I also feel that beggars canyons is not such a bad thing to keep, I like it. Also gwiz's idea of being able to see if a user is inactive is a good one. Although I think that nested comments are a good idea, hiding comments below a certain vote is not.

lower the front page treshold to 8 or 7 votes, and set the pq treshold to 3-4 votes. maybe then we'll finaly learn to downvote crappy posts, plus our pq's won't be so long

>> ^Deano:
^Personally I like to comment because I feel others might benefit/enjoy it, not because I'm going to get a power or star point.
And this is a video posting site. If there's a better aggregator out there then link to it.


Several things - in that case, why not post videos for this reason and not for getting star points? Don't act like i'm a prostitute because i like to see my quality contributions acknowledged in the same way you do.

Secondly, it's almost not to do with the fact that star points aren't awarded, it's probably more to do with the fact that they were REMOVED, leaving me (a comment only bronze star member - intentionally so) feeling that i'm worthless to the site. I'd say my comments are more valuable than a lot of the videos upvoted by the circle-jerks on the site.

I've mentioned this stuff before, but I think there are a couple of things that can be changed to prevent a lot of the abuse we see around here.

1) Implement a time limit on downvotes -- make it so that you can only cast a downvote, say, once every three minutes. If you're legitimately watching videos and downvoting them, you shouldn't even notice this limit. However, it would help curtail downvoting sprees as you'd have to have a lot of patience to downvote one video every three minutes for all of a member's videos.

2) Eliminate the ability to for anyone above a certain level to discard someone else's videos / sift talk posts. This feature is so ripe for abuse, it's ridiculous. And why do we need it? It used to be helpful to discard dupes, but with the dupeof command that's become unnecessary. The only possible use I can think of for it now is to discard the video of a banned, self-linking member in order to clean up the sift talk page. However this can easily be done by an admin, or perhaps a select few trustworthy individuals assigned this power.

>> ^dannym3141:
>> ^Deano:
^Personally I like to comment because I feel others might benefit/enjoy it, not because I'm going to get a power or star point.
And this is a video posting site. If there's a better aggregator out there then link to it.

Several things - in that case, why not post videos for this reason and not for getting star points? Don't act like i'm a prostitute because i like to see my quality contributions acknowledged in the same way you do.
Secondly, it's almost not to do with the fact that star points aren't awarded, it's probably more to do with the fact that they were REMOVED, leaving me (a comment only bronze star member - intentionally so) feeling that i'm worthless to the site. I'd say my comments are more valuable than a lot of the videos upvoted by the circle-jerks on the site.



First point: you're forgetting the raison d'etre of the site. To sift out the best video. So this requires a voting mechanism and it reasonably follows that you accord some status to those who submit the best clips in order to encourage more submissions. It's a metagame that clearly engages alot of people even though ultimately it's inconsequential. Also there are a good many here who like to submit video that is appreciated by others. I've been here since around 2006 and I'm not getting a Diamond anytime soon. I don't care. I do like powerpoints though. Helping good video make it through is rewarding.

Second point: you have posted about this issue before. You seem to be the only one that deeply concerned about it presumably because you dug that part of the metagame. But sometimes the rules of the game changes - you either play on or leave the field. Personally I think it's an odd obsession particularly when it leaves you feeling "worthless". And that comment about "circle-jerks" comes across as bitter. Seriously an entertainment site shouldn't leave you feeling this way.

I don't care what else happens here - GOD NO, NO comment nesting!!!

It makes it WAY too hard to respond to multiple comments and is visually cluttering.

^That's exactly why I think that if nested commenting is considered, that we make a test drive first, because if it gets too visually cluttering then it's no good.

Re: Comments:

We should have more control over which comments appear as we browse the site. Edeot mentioned auto-hiding comments with a low vote total. Along those lines, we should be able to hide comments based on the following criteria, which are turned on or off based on the original user.

- Low Vote total (vote threshold set by user)
- Banned User
- Comments with only invocations
- Siftbot acting on an invocation
- Featured comment box

Speaking of invocations, they clutter up the comment space of videos, which is annoying. Sometimes invocations are included with other comments, but when a comment is only invocations, it shouldn't be considered a comment. So when a user posts a comment that is only invocations, Siftbot should automatically delete the comment and replace it with his response (along with a quote of the original invocation). That way the invocation doesn't take up extra space and isn't counted in the video's comment total.

Re: Videos:

Just one thought -- I still think there should be a visual indication of whether or not a PQueued video is currently in Beggar's Canyon.

Re: Money:

We all know Siftbot is secretly plotting to rule the world; why doesn't he use some of those cycles to add power to a beowulf cluster and bring in a bit of extra cash for the site? You'd think Siftbot would take a larger role in preserving the site and thus his own existence: We all saw what happened to CADIE, after all.

>> ^Sarzy:
2) Eliminate the ability to for anyone above a certain level to discard someone else's videos / sift talk posts. This feature is so ripe for abuse, it's ridiculous. And why do we need it? It used to be helpful to discard dupes, but with the dupeof command that's become unnecessary. The only possible use I can think of for it now is to discard the video of a banned, self-linking member in order to clean up the sift talk page. However this can easily be done by an admin, or perhaps a select few trustworthy individuals assigned this power.


The discard invocation is still good for getting rid of cluttering ST posts. If a new member asks a question in an ST post and gets it answered, there's no need for that ST post to hang around.

Also, I've never seen nesting that wasn't cluttering or that didn't throw a brick into the gears of thread flow.Every time someone posts a comment that nests, it gets indented. Then it has to break off in shorter lines to go down in increasingly narrower fields.

Also, no matter what happens, NEVER allow signatures. Never allow animated gifs in comments. Don't allow shiney badges next to avatars. Don't allow animated avatars.

In other words, keep comments EXACTLY like they are. It's very simple, un-cluttered and flows smoothly.

I'd like to see the FAQ get a makeover with the help of some of the creative talent on this site. Between the ranking system, invocations, posting rules and all of the weird and awesome culture/mythology we've built up over the years, it's a fairly complex place. It would be nice if the FAQ were more fun to read and explained more of the cultural quirks of the site.

The rules could be done in the style of an airplane safety brochure. The discussion of power points and rank could be described as if it were some type of fantasy RPG and done in the style of an old PRIMA strategy guide (invocations as spells, etc.). Maybe we could even coax one of the filmmakers to do an old classroom filmstrip style instructional video.

Continuing with the gamer theme, it would also be fun to have a set of xbox style 'achievement points' for achieving particular tasks (getting 100 votes on a video, sifting 3 vids in a day, etc.)

Would love to hear ideas from others on this.

I'd like to see nested comments too.

Absolute no on comment nesting. We should hold a vote if luckydag is considering it.

PQ idea: limit them to 5 videos. As a new unsifted video enters the PQ it pushes out the last in the PQ in a first in first out type of fashion (once the maximum 5 videos has been met). You would of course be able to rearrange the order of the list of videos in there with a beg, a promote, or even a feature that allows us to rearrange them manually through some sort of interface.

- nested comments, no
- siftquisitions and hobbiting, no!
they air out everyones dirty laundry in public forum, cause unneeded drama and choas, and make everyone look like asses when they get all emotionally invested in a situation they know nothing about and only exists online. example: usesprozacs siftquisition (i dont think shes been back since), and my own siftquisition which in reality was nothing more than a social experiment and thinker and i making a public mockery of the entire feature. and let me tell you, it was exhausting.

- hiding invocation requests and siftbots reponse to them, yes (maybe just the person who performed such invocation could see some alert to let them know it worked?)
- changes to the pq, no
- dumping the pq of long time inactive users, probably, but we need stringent guidelines
- revisions to the channels!!!!! the channel feature is cluttered and many are cumbersome. can we vote to eliminate some channels? if a member wants to recreate and maintain said channel when they hit 250+ fantastic. or open up abandoned channels to 100+ members? and keep the reserve on creating your own channel for diamonds?

Top 3
1. Neighbour system (cf. last.fm)
2. Partly self-redacted and redacted (by members, advertisers) VS-frontpage or on a complementary URL
3. Making video submission time irrelevant

OBAMA IS GREAT WOOOO CHANGE!

Star point, please.

Too many comments for me to read through right now.

If it hasn't yet been mentioned, I think it would be cool if * dupeof comments were recognized as clickable links like regular urls in comments leading to the the original video.

Hiding invocation requests = YES! (less clutter in comments is always good)
Still, some sort of notation of who did the invoking is good. I would say, perhaps put the name of the invoker next to the invocations... not a solution, but something to wrap your mind around.

Like Doc says, hide or compress comments that contain only an invocation. Perhaps even more of a no-brainer, compress all of siftbot's invocation confirmations like so.

Re: hiding invocations, I think that implementing campionidelmondo's idea into the site as a whole would be perfect, if it's possible.

I'd like to be able to jump to the top or bottom of the page quickly instead of scroooolling up and down these long threads

^ Try using the Home and End buttons on your keyboard, swampgirl.

Or, if you've got a Mac, and it doesn't work/there are no buttons like those, then, well... That's Apple for you. By the way, is it still impossible to recover a single file from the Trash Bin in Mac OSX? Oh yeah, I'm Apple's biggest fan.

Revamp PQs thusly: add a PQ tab at the top of the front page and kill Beggar's Canyon. Require 3 or 4 votes for a vote to enter PQ after two days in "unsifted" or else be discarded. Limit PQ to 15 or 20, and discard the surplus after the limit is reached. I think people are squeamish about discarding failed vids (myself included) because we all want credit for a good post, even if it doesn't get votes. But this thinking isn't fair to the quality of the content. If a video is truly worthy, someone else will find it, or you can run it up the flagpole again after it gets discarded; don't just let good posts sit in exile because you want the credit for the post.

No comment nesting. I've never heard a complaint about the comment system before this thread. I like to see everything, and it rarely gets out of hand (and when it does, it's usually because we WANT it to, and we'll be able to find a way to make nested commenting just as ridiculous). And KILL SIFTQUISITIONS AND HOBBLING. We used to use the world Siftquisition as a tongue-in-cheek half-insult when some member got overly sensitive. Now, we give license to whining half-wits who can't handle their own shit. "Quality" shouldn't just be about the videos, if you know what I mean.

Also, "Command/up arrow" and "Command/down arrow" are the page-up and page-down keys on a Mac. I guess having keys on a board that do more than one thing and that don't have a name so glaringly obvious it's almost insulting is only for some people.

I already mentioned this a while ago, but when submitting a video it would be nice to have the text of the channel checkboxes be links to the relevant subpages, or have guidelines in the hover-over text. This helps in deciding if a video belongs in a certain channel.

Also it would be nice if the comments were transferred when the dupe command is used.

I think SiftBot should wear pants. I'm sick of seeing his flour dusted wiener. Make that happen for 4.0. Thanks.

I think it'd be cool if there were a feature where we could submit videos that we found on the internet and then have other members of the community vote on these videos. It's risky, I know, but I think it's worth a shot...

Wow, those buttons have a function!?!

>> ^EDD:
^ Try using the Home and End buttons on your keyboard, swampgirl.
Or, if you've got a Mac, and it doesn't work/there are no buttons like those, then, well... That's Apple for you. By the way, is it still impossible to recover a single file from the Trash Bin in Mac OSX? Oh yeah, I'm Apple's biggest fan.

>> ^swampgirl:
Wow, those buttons have a function!?!
>> ^EDD:
^ Try using the Home and End buttons on your keyboard, swampgirl.
Or, if you've got a Mac, and it doesn't work/there are no buttons like those, then, well... That's Apple for you. By the way, is it still impossible to recover a single file from the Trash Bin in Mac OSX? Oh yeah, I'm Apple's biggest fan.



Swampie, it's painfully obvious if a button is marked with the words "home" and "end" then they must be for scrolling webpages, right? RIGHT?!

There was talk of creating a wiki to replace/compliment the FAQ, which I hope happens. This should include tweaks to youtube embed codes (ie. start frame, removing comments, etc) and other valuable nuggets pertaining to Stephen Colbert.

I'd like to see some functionality for non-video links to be voted on, but that's probably just me.

(and yes, I realize the name of the site has VIDEO in it)

I want the ability to promote and quality individual video comments too.

The ability to individually remove channels via invocations would be nice.

Don't do anything too radical though.

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

Radical? What makes you think we'd do something radical?

I know what you mean about promoting comments - I have often felt that urge too.

Nah... other than the letters, enter, shift, space, backspace and tab, the rest are ignored.

pause/break..prtsc/sysrq, all the F buttons...? waste of space on my key pad

That page up and down button turns out to be pretty handy!

>> ^blankfist:
>


Swampie, it's painfully obvious if a button is marked with the words "home" and "end" then they must be for scrolling webpages, right? RIGHT?!

I'd like to see a comment bumping feature, where posting a comment bumps a video/talk to the top of either discussions or some other list (regardless of comment rating) so that people can see active discussions.

As it is, discussions can scarcely last beyond 4 days because that as long as a video is around where people can see it. Maybe you don't have to do this for videos, but I think it is necessary for sift talk.

There's one thing I'd really like but it might not be possible to do. I'd like a "play all" functionality on playlists. It would be great to have friends over and just have a playlist running in the background. It'd be a really big deal if you could make a playlist of material from different hosts.

Adding to the thumbnails suggestion:

thumbnails for youtube playlists.

>> ^dag:
Radical? What makes you think we'd do something radical?

I think it's the mustache you've grown.

Create a *Dance channel, because we've been needing it since day one.

I have an Idea for the PQ system.

Create a new part of the sift, in addition to "Beggars Canyon" have "Deaths Door"

Each video can be begged for twice and " *Lastchance " 'd once.
If the video still doesn't have 10 votes after that the video embed gets killed.

That, or for each vote a video recieves, that's the amount of time it's allowed to stay in the PQ.
I.e. a video gets 1 vote, it's allowed 1 month, all the way to 9 months to get it published.
9 months is ample time to try and get a video sifted if you work at it.

Or, possibly an intricate combination of the two ideas.

1. Make the show video/minimize video links so that they are in the same spot regardless of what you have toggled, but keep the thumbnail in the same place. Right next to the comments, embed, email, bookmark, and playlists links seems MUCH more intuitive to me. It really annoys me that I have to move the mouse back and forth to toggle the video (though oddly not so much to play/stop the video, then move cursor back to the toggle link. I think the annoyance is visual consistency. It would just seem to flow better.)


2. Add links to the actual channels on the submit video or maybe a little button to the side of each channel listing to expand to the channel's description about the channel and what videos belong there. I frequently run into the problem when I'm posting a video and unsure about what channel to put it in, then I have to open a new tab and type in the url of the channel just to look at the channel's description so I make sure I don't post it to the wrong channel, maybe even a link in the desc to open the channel in a new tab. Maybe this will cut down on the need to use *nochannel and reduce the number of siftbot comments I have to scroll past.


3. Speaking of links, what about making some of the menu items at the header drop down so that it reduces the number of links I have to click on to get where I want to go? For instance, make it so that hovering the cursor over "channels" makes a drop-down menu or something comparable appear with the channel links?


4. There also seems to be a lot of wasted screen space when it comes to comments. There's gotta be a way to fit more comments into the vertical space so that I don't have to scroll/page as much to read comments. I think the offending space for me is the 2-3 blank lines' worth between the bottom of the comment body and the info for who posted it (username/timestamp/etc) .

Less white space within each comment means it's easier for people to skim (but keep the space between different people's comments, since you need that separation to distinguish between each individual comments, alternatively, reduce that space too, but use some sort of visual partition, like username/timestamp, at top of comment, keeping other typical comment links below comment body). I also like reddit's commenting system where replies to somebody's comment are branched off like a subtree. That way, it's easier to follow the flow of discussions long after the fact.

Now that I'm talking about white space, what about being able to toggle the side panel so that the main content of the page (video(s) and comments) can expand to fill the entire with of the screen? There is a lot of wasted space near the bottom of the page after the panel ends (and imo unnecessary space in some parts of the side panel in general). Maybe have toggle buttons for each sub-panel within the main side panel?


5. Is there a way to search for long and brief videos or a secret channel for them that I don't know about? Frequently, when I come to the sift, I just want to queue up a bunch of long videos I can sit through while I munch on food or something. Or better yet, implement a system sort of like a playback queue that you can flag videos that look interesting to you but you don't currently have time to watch, then later you can go to that queue and just click through them all (I imagine getting them to automagically play in a row would be quite difficult, considering logistics of all the different types of embeds?) The only reason I bring this one up is b/c I don't know about you guys, but I quit subscribing to cable b/c I think it's a waste of money, and now get much of my news/entertainment from the internet (and radio, but that's irrelevant)

/phew!

I like Edeot's nested quotes/comments idea. I think we could have some type of tree structure that will be collapsed for large threads with lots of different posts (like this one) and expanded for smaller threads. I think it would make strings like this easier to navigate. The reason most of us are here is to get the best videos on the web without having to spend the time wading through the rest. It would be nice if I could read a post like this and get the gist without having to read all 83 comments.

I also think the PQ needs some revamping. It literally makes sifting just a matter of time. It used to be a video would have to be good to get 10 people's attention within 2 days, now it has all the time in the world to get those ten people's attention. Maybe we could increase the required vote count every 6 months by 5 or after the 2 days expires than it needs to reach a certain votes:views ratio. I like the beggars canyon because I've had a lot of videos that just didn't get quite enough attention before PQ and got it there. I like Shepppard's idea of Death's Door, but use that INSTEAD of the beggar's canyon. Send a PQ video there for 3-4 days and then to the discard pile afterward. The way it is right now it's the only thing anyone below goldstar can use power points for, so why not have a video in there constantly? You've got nothing to lose and nothing else to spend those power points on.

Also, to add on to cybrbeast's idea, I'd like the channel names by the checkboxes for channels to be the same colors as they are when the video is viewed. Would make it much quicker when going through them.

New Idea: Power points need a revamp IMO. I like the idea, but we give them out for everything now (in lew of star points). Why not take away the auto-recharge on power points? Everyone would have to earn each point by helping the sift through maintance (fix deadpools), insight (applause), or financial support (donations). That way spending them on things like /promote and /quality will be something a bit more unique and make promote more useful since there wouldn't be 3 videos CONSTANTLY promoted to all queues at all times. It would also cut down the deadpool, which is growing since it stopped giving star points. Finally, It would be nice to remove the limit since there shouldn't be a limit on how helpful someone can be.

I noticed something while posting vids on facebook. They have a search for YouTube videos exclusively if you want to post on someone's wall. Could someone make an app for facebook that posts through the Sift? Currently I find the good videos on VideoSift, and then switch over to Facebook, then search for the video again. It would be sweet if there was a "one-click post" or something. Also, an app like the scrolling top-15 gadget or something could be cool.

The Google-Feed-scrolling-top15 gadget: When I click on it, it directs me to videosift away from my google page, instead of opening up a new tab.

>> ^Deano:
Power up playlists. Make them searchable, give them metadata so I can find one on a given subject (there must be zillions). This would also prevent me making one that's already covered.

It would be so cool to have a running random playlist of videos. Like the video version of Pandora or Deezer.

I think we're all wasting our time discussing this; something tells me dag has already devised his final solution.

Also, something that shows which videos are currently in beggars canyon would be nice.

New icons for diamond 250/500.
Profile page takes note if you are a top ten sifter of a particular channel.
Ability to read comments without going to the single video page.
Power points used to *promote should recharge quicker.
Brief should be under 2 minutes.

MrFisk cannot promote this post because MrFisk does not have enough Power Points. (You can always purchase more Power Points.)

>> ^MrFisk:
Ability to read comments without going to the single video page.


just click on comments, no?

I think all these suggestions should be put into a single post and let the community vote on them.

I would also like to suggest that if a probie's comment gets applauded, they lose their P. There are some probies who have contributed quite a few good comments but still have that ugly P.

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

Thanks everyone - I have added the suggestions to our 4.0 list where we'll weigh them up and incorporate all that we can. *unsticky for now, but feel free to keep adding, we'll be watching.

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

One other thing...

Is there a way to adapt Varo CMS into a Microsoft Outlook plug-in so that Siftbot can send a message to notify all my friends and family that the "funny / amazing internet video" that they forwarded was seen by me two freekin' YEARS AGO on VideoSift?

That'd be great, and SO useful. Thanks.

An iphone version would be nice too.

I realize the "no flash problem" is still a hurdle to overcome, but maybe there is a way to make it work at least for clips provided in a compatible format.

Writing this from an iphone right now, and some things are quite a bitch to handle, like comment upvotes etc... Would really love a stripped down mobile version with just the key features.

This town needs an enema!

So when do we find out what make the cut for Sift 4.0?