Welcome to VideoSift 3.0

posted by Brian Houston (dag) 1 decade 6 years 8 months ago • 11,740 views
This is the brand new VideoSift platform. There are so many new goodies that I'm not sure where to start. -but let's begin with the wide angle.

VideoSift has migrated off of the honorable open source Pligg Content Management System. We're now on a completely new platform, built from scratch to be just for VideoSift. The software was wrought completely from the blood and guts of our resident code ninja, Rommel (Lucky) Santor - and it's called VaroCMS. (Ask Lucky about the name).

We're also on a brand new server. Without going into too much detail, I want to mention that the whole platform is built for performance. We've removed almost all images from the layout, and static content like thumbnails, scripts and style sheets are stored on a Content Delivery Network (CDN). So no matter where you are in the world, you'll be downloading the heavy stuff quickly from a server near you.

We've also replaced the video listings with thumbnails instead of the actual embeds. This helps us in a couple of ways. It whacks off about 400K from a front-page load (10 embeds). It also lets you close a video window and move on to the next one. If you are a regular Sifter, you know what I'm talking about: You're watching something- get bored and move to the next video down, but the previous video is still downloading, even though you don't want it to. That's fixed.

Finally, comment threads now expand dynamically under video posts- so you can check out the discussion without having to interrupt a playing video.

Channels

Member created Collectives have been merged with Channels. If you were a Collective Manager, you are now a Channel Manager.

Channels have been made into real sub-communities with individual "Talk" areas and queues.

We're sorry that we were not able to migrate your Collective CSS styles to the new VideoSift - but- now channel managers can change almost everything about a channel's UI. Go crazy.

Comments

I mentioned that comments expand under video posts. The other big change is the "applaud" system for comments. Five applauds of a great comment gives the commenter a star point. Alternatively, five "inappropriate" votes will make the comment disappear from view.

I know there's some trepidation about this feature in our community - but I think it will be a change for the good. I expect it will be used much more to reward all of the time people put into crafting good comments around here. We don't want the "inappropriate" button to be used for vendettas, grudges or even when you disagree with a comment. It's really for the gross stuff - use your judgement and err on the side leniency.

The recent comments page also now tracks comments in other places like profiles, Channel Talks and Playlists.

Invocations

This is my favorite feature on VideoSift- because it grew organically out of the community. I love how Sifters work invocations into comments to make a kind of meta speech. Now, videos can be assigned to channels by invoking the short title (sub-domain) of the channel. *WTF, this is going to fun, *woohoo, lets *rocknroll.

There are also a lot more admin invocations that are available depending on your star level. The complete list is here.

The Dead Pool

Bronze Stars and above have access to a special area called "The Dead Pool" It's more of a hospital really, but the name stuck. When a video is marked *dead, the original poster is notified by email, and they have 48 hours to find an alternate source for the embed. If it's not fixed in that time, it goes to the The Dead Pool.

In the Dead Pool, the video code can be swapped out by any privileged Sifter and returned to the live site. The fixer receives a star point for fixing the video, but the original poster keeps ownership of the video.

Thanks

Thanks go first to the man of the hour. Lucky's had very little sleep, so be nice to him. Every line of code from VideoSift 3.0 has sprung fully formed from his forehead - and that takes a lot out of someone. I don't know how we got a coder of L's calibre working for VideoSift, but we appreciate him greatly.

Thanks next to the alpha and beta testers who ran the code through its paces. That was invaluable, and shines a nice light on what the shared brainpower of a community can do.

Lastly, thanks go to Ricardo Galli, and Pligg, the creators of the CMS that we are leaving. In my un-media-savvy attempt at getting some publicity for VideoSift 3.0, I did some damage to Pligg that I didn't intend. I regret that. We are very grateful for having a platform like Pligg for the last 18 months.

44 Comments

dag says...

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

Also - expect some bugs.

This is an entirely new piece of software, and we're expecting teething problems. Please post any errors you find to this thread, and we'll knock 'em over one-by-one.

bluecliff says...

Hey lurker! I can see you! you too dotdude.

Seeing who's viewing a page is a really nice novelty.
- the page loading takes a little bit more time though.


All in all congratulations!
*Quality

pyrex says...

Yeah, it would be great if we could get an option in our profile options to have videos expanded by default. Still, that's the only gripe I have so far.

James Roe says...

Hey guys,

I know it's been sort of slow. We think that we have traced the problem down to some issues with our robots.txt file which controls how bots interact with the website. Basically all of the major search engines flipped out over not being able to index the site over night and we are seeing a request every second or so from several ips. This traffic is largely targeted at some pages that are no longer at their original urls. We are working on reducing the impact that this is having on the server.

joedirt says...

*sticky (By the way, you guys might have hosed your SEO..

i wonder if there wasn't a way to redirect the bots with a htaccess to rewrite/ send them to an old static version of 2.5

James Roe says...

joe dirt,

these are requests for non charter user pages, bigger, email_this, and embed_this so i think that it should probably not affect our video seo. Some non charter members might see their page rank drop on user name searches but that should even out in a month or so.

Fletch says...

Looks really good.

One small thing I noticed is that expanding the comments under a video listing lowers a comments box that seems to be scaled for 1024. It would be nice if it was scaled for the wider 1600 I am using.

BrknPhoenix says...

I hate to criticize, especially when someone that is with you guys did the work, but I honestly prefer just about everything from the old layout over this one. Sorry

It may or may not also be important to note... I'm not sure of your demographics, but many older individuals will not be able to use the site. I'm not an older individual myself, so it doesn't matter to me, just saying. As people get older, their ability to see the color blue decreases. I'm not an expert so I don't know how much, but judging by how extremely light the color of blue used widely in this layout is, I'd be willing to bet a lot of older people couldn't see any links at all.

joedirt says...

Crap.. VS is missing out on the older-people-who-cannot-see-blue demographic.

one would hope visually impaired people figured out how to use something like WebDeveloper extension to overwrite CSS values like "siftblue". At any rate, the color scheme is about the same as previous videosifts.

rembar says...

Lucky, you are insane. No joke. I am totally floored by the scale of the project you have just completed in such a short time. Hats off to you, and to Dag and James and all else involved in running VS.

The time for fine-tuning will come, but for now....wow.

dag says...

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

We're actually specifically trying to weed out the older-people-who-cannot-see-blue demographic. It's part of our evil plan.

BrknPhoenix, I would urge you to give it a bit of time - believe it or not, there were Sifers urging us to go back to the 1.0 layout too. ;-) (tangerine orange and military green).

You're concerns are valid though - and the site will definitely change when enough people tell us there's something they don't like.

winkler1 says...

Looking good guys. One issue with the AJAX'y stuff: some things come up inline (show comments / expand video), but others don't. For instance, I was watching an expanded video and clicked New Comment, was surprised to have it navigate away (and lose my place).

Could there be some visual vocabulary to indicate which links will go to a new page, and better obey the Law of Least Astonishment?

lucky760 says...

>>One small thing I noticed is that expanding the comments under a video listing lowers a comments box that seems to be scaled for 1024. It would be nice if it was scaled for the wider 1600 I am using.

Very good observation. We'll definitely make it adjust with the page width. It'll happen soon.

>>Could there be some visual vocabulary to indicate which links will go to a new page, and better obey the Law of Least Astonishment?

Excellent point/suggestion, winkler1. We'll come up with something, like maybe that little box with an arrow pointing out of it or something..

>>Lucky, you are insane. No joke.

Thanks very much, rembar. People like you make it all worthwhile.

winkler1 says...

This is probably absurdly hard, but I'll ask anyway--

When I click the thumbnail of a vid, I expect it to start playing. Haven't used 3.0 much, doing real work, so I'm still adjusting.

Is there any way to tell the vids to start playing? Even if was just for YouTube vids, this would be really nice.

looris says...

Overall Top Channels
The highest ranked channels overall as determined by votes cast by all members.

Fine. Where's complete rankings? Or, at least, how can I know how many votes and videos my channel has?

I also miss many collective-related functions, such as top collective posters, top collective videos, and so on (maybe there are but I couldn't find'em).

Moreover, in the "Channels Listed Alphabetically" the basic channels are missing. So, if one of them isn't listed in the top10, it isn't listed anywere in the channel page...

Finally, a grievous1 question: Viral VS Commercial. I find many many commercial videos who aren't viral by any means. And I *do* mean many.
I guess more than half of the viral channel are actually commercials, due to the fact that the commercial channel wasn't there.
Should I simply add the *commercial channel, or am I also supposed to remove the viral one where I feel it's inappropriate? Can we have a simpler way of modifying channels? Either similar to the tags or playlists one, or anyway better than *nochannel *one *two *three *four *five invocation, that when channels are all-five is really a pain in the ass.

Anyway, gg, I'm really linking VS3

PS: so, looks like I was the only one besides JR to use "bigger" function, weren't we?

PS: rotfl@Goofball_Jones

1 i don't actually know what grievous mean, that was a nice-sounding word and I decided to use it

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