Though I think YouTube is the best video sharing site all-around (and since it's by far the most popular one, it's the best bet for being able to find specific obscure things you're searching for, and the best bet for getting your own stuff seen), I have a lot of complaints with it. Some of these complaints are familiar ones that many others have made before. Others I haven't seen any discussion of. This has gotten rather long (YouTube has a lot of issues), and the order is somewhat random, so below is a table of contents. As new peeves come to peeve me, I'll probably update this page to add them.
There's no proper forum feature on the site. They do have a Groups feature, but it's not easy to stumble across, and even if you do, you have to dig through several pages of random contests and other groups not of general interest to find the only one that matters when it comes to discussing YouTube site or feature issues, the official YouTube group. The biggest problem, though, is that new topics require moderator approval. This is a great way to stifle discussion. I presume most proposed topics are denied, since there are currently only 7 topics despite the fact that the group has existed for just over a year. I tried to add a new topic to discuss the Related algorithm issue, but I don't have much hope they'll grant my request (or any idea of how long it'll be until they approve / deny, especially since it's the weekend). Update, 2007-02-04: The topic still shows up as "Pending Approval", over a week later. Update, 2007-06-11: Still "Pending Approval". Um, you can deny approval on that now, guys...
This leaves non-YouTube sites like blogs (such as this one) and tech news articles as the best place to search for information on YouTube issues and to discuss them, which is really inimical to YouTube's essential idea of (site-based) community.
Update, 2007-06-11: The YouTube Help Center now includes an "Announcements and Alerts" box where YouTube can acknowledge current problems (like the current one that's causing uploaded videos to take somewhere between 15 and 24 hours to process) and give info on them. You can also get to this info via the URL https://youtubestatus.blogspot.com/. This is definitely a good addition (although many people likely won't find it and wouldn't understand why the main YouTube blog doesn't include this information), but of course it's just a one-way communication channel and not a substitute for a proper forum feature.
Of course forums (okay, okay, "fora") for discussing YouTube problems with other users wouldn't be as necessary if their customer service were better. I have submitted several problems to YouTube's Contact form in the past, and generally all I get is a form letter with FAQs that happen to have keywords in common with my request, but discuss issues wholly unrelated to my problem. This hasn't been so bad recently, now that they've converted to sending a reply with possibly related FAQs that clearly marks itself as automated, but it was incredibly maddening back when it would be sent to you my a named YouTube customer support representative along with an obnoxiously cheery "Hope this helps!". Well, no, it didn't, guys.
The only time I've ever gotten a response to a question that was actually helpful was one time when I was asking about a feature rather than reporting a problem. I was trying to figure out how some users had an additional photo displayed on their channel page in the "Connect with username" box, hosted somewhere else besides youtube.com. I couldn't find anywhere in the interface to do this, and the Help Center didn't address it. Eventually I was informed by one of the reps that this is a special feature available to Comedian accounts. However, that was only after I was twice given an incorrect answer explaining how to set the main profile picture from a video, despite the fact that I very clearly explained in my original question that I was asking not about the main profile picture, but the extra one as described above, and even gave an example channel when I responded to the first off-base answer.
Other than that, the only semi-useful response I've ever gotten was when I've submitted the Base64-encoded debug dumps you get along with '500 Internal Server Error's, where they thanked me for my submission and said they were still working on the problem. Generally I get no response at all. At least they did recently fix the form to send you a copy of your submission, rather than requiring you to use copy & paste if you wanted to save a record of it. Update, 2007-02-02: I got another partially useful response from customer service, in answer to a question about the bogus 2 1/2 stars issue.
Also, within the past few days they've made it more difficult to submit messages to customer service. The general contact form linked to above has been changed to no longer have the "Customer Service" option for the Subject field, yet there's no link to the new form to be used for support. They just give you a general link to the Help Center, where there's no link to the new support form. You can try searching for an answer to your question, but if your question is one not discussed in one of the existing questions, all you get is a message saying there were no matches. To find the new support form, you actually have to click on some question that's completely unrelated to yours, and the bottom of that, there's a Contact us link, which of course goes to a different form than the Contact link in the footer. The new form requires you to manually type in your email address and YouTube username even if you're logged into your YouTube account, and has new requirements to select your Operating system, Browser and version, and Connection type, even if you know these could have absolutely no bearing on the issue at hand.
I guess the reason the new form requires you to tell it who you are, by the way, is because it's hosted on www.google.com (so it can't read the youtube.com cookies). This marks the first tangible sign I've seen of Google's new ownership of YouTube. Perhaps Google, with their greater resources, will be able to improve the state of YouTube's customer service, although they've had their own customer service issues. I am a bit heartened in that I recently received my first non-automated response to a Google problem report (a complaint that the new design of Image Search where all image attributes are now hidden until you mouse over them is a huge step backwards in terms of usability and search efficiency). I had submitted a number of bug reports and suggestions to Google between 2001 and 2003, but never received any useful reply — only autoresponses — so I had given up on sending them feedback until this issue, which bothered me so much that I couldn't hold back. The response didn't actually help, of course, but it did state that they appreciated the feedback, and it was written in way that suggested that a human had typed at least part of it, rather than being purely form-letter-based. (Update, 2007-02-21: And I noticed today that Google has reverted that ill-conceived change to Image Search! Whoo hoo!)
Now, I know I'm not paying anything for YouTube (or Google), so perhaps I can't expect awesome customer service, but someone is paying for the site (the advertisers), and they need to funnel enough of that money over to properly supporting the end-users, since of course without happy, frequently visiting end-users, that advertising won't be worth much.
Update, 2007-04-30: Customer service quality has improved lately. Some problems that I've reported have been (later) fixed. Not sure how much influence my individual problem reports have had on these fixes, but I'm feeling a lot more like someone's listening. I still have instances of getting completely inappropriate form-letter responses that don't address the issue I'm reporting, though.
There are reportedly a number of video sharing sites out there with better audio and video quality than YouTube, but except for pro and semi-pro filmmakers, I can't see them drawing that many people on that basis alone. Thus I can only hope YouTube will eventually introduce better quality as well. Unfortunately I can imagine them perhaps offering this only for Director accounts (more on these in a moment). In general, YouTube's quality is acceptable, although the service's apparent tendency to introduce serious A/V sync issues when some types of video are uploaded really needs to be gotten to the bottom of.
I would love to have the ability to upload videos longer than 10 minutes without having to split them up (and no, I don't want this so I can post copies of TV shows and movies), but this requires signing YouTube's Director Agreement, in which you assert you own (or have licensed) all copyrights to everything in your videos — they don't even extend the Fair Use exceptions to you! I had been considering signing up for one regardless (perhaps as a separate account), but I see I wavered too long on that decision — the form now says:
This form is temporarily disabled.
We will activate it again soon, after we redesign this feature. When it's ready, you will be able to apply to upload videos greater than 10 minutes long onto YouTube.
I hope I didn't miss the opportunity to be grandfathered, with the new version requiring even more onerous agreements and/or subscription fees.
Update, 2007-04-29: Apparently at the beginning of this month, YouTube finally re-enabled the ability to convert accounts to Director. They removed the requirement to sign the Director Agreement and removed the approval process — conversion to Director now happens immediately. However, this is not much of a win since Director accounts no longer have the ability to upload > 10 minute videos (despite the promise in the notice quoted above that this would be coming back). Presumably they did this because lots of people signed up for Director accounts just to be able to upload full-length copies of movies and TV shows that they didn't own the rights to. So now the only benefits to a Director account are the "DIRECTOR" badge, the ability to upload a 55x55 channel graphic (which gets recompressed in an extremely lossy, uglifying fashion), and the chance to have your videos show up in the "Director Videos" column on the right side of pages (no idea what algorithm they use to determine which Director videos to show there, though).
Sorry, this is a long one, since I've included a bunch of technical info and
the results of testing I did related to this. In short, you can't choose the
thumbnail frame (the one that represents the video in serach results, the
Related tab, etc.) — YouTube automatically picks an unpredictable frame
from about the middle of the clip. If that's enough info for you on this,
please feel free to scroll down to the next peeve.
So, while working on my Universal's House of Horrors @ USH HHN'06 video, I learned some things the hard way about how YouTube chooses the thumbnail frame (in search results and on embedded videos like on the just-linked page) while working with this clip, the second I'd posted to YouTube (on the first, I got lucky and got a good thumbnail frame so didn't realize it was an issue yet). I had read commentators on multiple sites talk about how YouTube's thumbnails were better than Google Video's because they display three random frames rather than just one, but this is no longer be the case. The only place on YouTube where they still show three frames is on the view all comments screen. The one frame that's shown on screens other than that is not random — it comes from the middle of the clip. However, though it's been claimed it comes from exactly the middle frame, e.g. in this annoying clip from YouTube personality Renetto (which perhaps tellingly has the thumbnail picture appear on much more than just one frame in the middle), and this is sometimes the case, as seen in this "better youtube test" clip, it does not always work this way.
The frame chosen by YouTube for my original version of this clip was unfortunately almost completely black. I then researched and found out about the "frame halfway through" thing, so I increased the length of the screen with the URL of my site at the end of my clip, to move the middle of the clip such that it would land on a frame of something illuminated. However, once I was done re-rendering my adjusted video, uploading it, and waiting for YouTube to process it, I found that the thumbnail frame displayed was not the one I had chosen. It wasn't even ±1 from the one I'd put in the middle.
I therefore rendered a test version of my clip with burned-in timecode (in absolute frames). The clips was 11,442 frames long, numbered 0 through 11,441, so YouTube theoretically should have chosen frame #5,720 or #5,721, depending on whether it rounds up or down, but instead, I found that it chose #5,709.
I embarked on a lot of testing (which I'll spare you the details of — they're gorier than anything in the above video) and learned some important things. The thumbnail frame YouTube picks is quantized to 15-frame increments. So, in the case of this clip, I could add or subtract several frames at the end and the thumbnail frame would remain #5,709. Add enough frames, though, and it would suddenly jump from #5,709 to #5,724. Likewise subtract enough and it would suddenly jump from #5,709 to #5,694.
Thus there's no way to get the exact frame you want to be the thumbnail frame by adding frames to or removing frames from the end of your movie. You can do coarse adjustment that way (adding/subtracting increments of 30 frames to/from the end) to get ±14 frames from the one you want, and then for the fine-tuning you'll have to shift all your content over by adding or subtracting frames at the beginning of your movie. Of course if you have a title screen at the beginning of your video rather than a logo/URL at the end like mine, it may be easier for you to skip the coarse adjustment and go straight to the fine. The benefit of making adjustments at the end of the clip is that you don't force YouTube viewers (with typically a short attention span) to sit through an unnaturally long (or unreadably short) title screen before they get to see the real content. A long logo at the end is no big deal, because if they get bored of looking at it they can click on to the next video (without having missed anything important on yours). I guess this should be doable by just placing silent black frames at the end of your video rather than a logo (with sound), but YouTube may optimize out such frames some day, if they don't already.
I didn't see any obvious pattern to determine how far offset from the true center frame YouTube picks — for instance, 5,710 / 15 = 380 2/3, not an even multiple. Therefore it seems like the best approach if you want to pick your exact thumbnail frame is to upload a private copy of your movie with timecode burned in to find which middle-ish frame YouTube chooses for the thumbnail at first, and then do the coarse / fine adjustment described above. However, I've found that sometimes when I remove the timecode plugin and re-render the final copy of my video, YouTube will end up picking a frame a few off from the one it picked in the timecode version, even though the length of the clip hasn't changed at all.
I should note that my source material in this testing was NTSC 29.97 frames per second video from a camcorder, and my output format was H.264/MPEG-4 AVC. It's feasible that some of this behavior might change slightly with different input or output formats — I've not done detailed testing on that yet (other than trying to render to 30 fps, which didn't make a difference). I understand that in MPEG-2, I-frames (full-information frames — the rest of the frames specify only changes from the previous or next frame) come every 15 frames. It's possible that YouTube can only pick I-frames as the thumbnail frame, potentially explaining the observed 15-frame quantization, although in MPEG-4, which I'm using, I-frame placement can be totally unpredictable (although it's possible the MainConcept codec I'm using puts them in at set intervals). Of course I would guess YouTube would transcode (or at least decompress) the video prior to picking the thumbnail frame, in which case my output format should be irrelevant — perhaps the 15-frame quantization comes from the Sorensen Spark codec that YouTube reportedly uses in their FLV files.
In any case, it would certainly make things a lot nicer if YouTube were to add a feature where you could choose an arbitrary frame to act as the thumbnail, preferably providing both a slider and a linked frame number display with text-edit capability, reflected live on a display of the video. Along with being much more user-friendly and efficient, this would stop the current artificially induced practice of editing videos such that their most visually interesting content is exactly in the middle (or perhaps worse, editing videos such that content is suddenly interrupted in the middle while a title card appears). Much of this content will outlive YouTube's current technical limitations, so in deciding what to fix they should give priority to the limitations that are shaping people's content in artificial and not-generally-beneficial ways. Not to mention the fact that they can reduce a bunch of load on their servers if they aren't having to receive, transcode, store, index, and stream multiple versions of people's videos as they have to re-edit and re-edit to get an acceptable thumbnail frame.
Update, 2007-07-12: Some time in the last couple of weeks (perhaps within the last couple of days) YouTube added the ability to select the thumbnail frame from the three that show on the "View all comments" page (about 25%, 50%, and 75% of the way through the video). This is certainly an improvement, but unless you get lucky on where those 25% or 75% frames happen to fall, all the above issues still apply. I went through my 25 videos after I learned of the new feature, and only on one video was one of the two new frames better than the one I'd maneuvered into the 50% location by tweaking the video length. I'm glad that for future videos I'll have two new locations around which I can search for decent-looking thumbnail frames, but I'm not overjoyed about the extra work this will entail (including figuring out the calculations for how many frames to add/subtract to move the chosen 25% and 75% points right or left by the 15-frame incremements). I still hope they implement arbitrary frame selection in the future.
It's great that YouTube has a feature to allow you to subscribe to a channel to be notified when new videos are posted to it, but their implementation of this is horrible. First off, when they say "you['ll be] notified whenever they upload new videos", you probably imagine you'll be sent an email with a link, right? No, sorry, you have to regularly go check your My Account: My Subscriptions page for new videos.
And it gets worse — you'd expect at least that the list of videos would be all the ones from your subscribed channels that you haven't watched yet, right? Well, sorry again, what they display is all the videos from those channels that have been posted recently (looking at my My Subscriptions page right now, the oldest one was added 6 days ago, so I'm guessing their definition of "new" is "posted within the last week"). If you click on a video to watch it, it will remember that and remove it from the list, but it only for the current browser session (which for Internet Explorer generally means just that window). If you come back tomorrow with a different browser session, all the videos you watched are back in the "new" list (except those now over a week old). And if you don't get to check YouTube for a week, you miss out on that week's worth of new videos and have to click on every channel you're subscribed to and look for ones you don't recognize.
Update, 2007-04-11: They improved this a little bit by making the My Subscriptions feature have multiple pages, so you can go further and further back in time rather than having to click on every single channel to find videos older than a week that you missed. The rest of the problems are still present, though.
Update, 2007-06-11: "Several days" before May 20, YouTube finally added the ability to get email notification when new videos are added in channels you're subscribed to. Unfortunately the email isn't actually sent when new videos are added — it's only available as a weekly digest. Don't know why YouTube is apparently so paranoid about mass emailing when new videos are added to popular channels. Currently the most-subscribed channel on YouTube has 116,861 subscribers, which I'm sure is well under the number of mass emails (newsletters, special offers, terms updates, etc.) sent out within a short period by sites like Amazon.com.
Another problem with the new feature is that only subscriptions added after the feature was implemented are by default checked in the "Subscription Update" section of the Email Options page that controls which channels you'll be notified of new videos on.
It's not difficult to go in and select "Check All" to rectify this, but first you would have to know to go into the Email Options and click on Show Subscriptions to reveal the issue. At this point I'm sure most people don't even know the feature is there — it appears to be undocumented, currently, and I only stumbled onto it because I was looking in the YouTube blog for something else and found an announcement about it. Thus far I've not received any of these notification emails, but hopefully this will change now that I've activated them for all the channels I'm subscribed to.
I don't get this one at all. The search results pages do appear to correctly report the number of ratings each video has, so why they heck can't they accurately report the ratings themselves?? You're forced to click on each video to find out what its real ratings is, making it a lot more time-consuming to determine which video are going to be worth your time. Recently I've started to see a few videos displayed on results pages with ratings other than 2 1/2 stars, but the ratings still aren't accurate — e.g. it'll show the rating as 3 1/2 stars when the real rating is 4 stars. Why does the search results page even show increments of 1/2 star, when ratings on the video pages themselves are rounded to whole stars?
Update, 2007-02-02: This issue had been bugging me for quite awhile, but while writing this entry it occurred to me that it was one I hadn't reported to YouTube. Therefore, I did so, and today I received a response. The rep. stated that in late November (2006) a "mass action" had set all ratings in search results to 2.5 stars, and that "correct ratings were and are still updating in the database according to new rankings coming in". That sounds like maybe videos will only show correct ratings in the search results if someone's rated them since late November. Which is weird, if true — if they have the correct ratings intact, why don't they just do another "mass action" to fix them in the search results, rather than waiting for videos to be fixed individually when / if new ratings come in for them?
Also, this is clearly not the whole story, since recently added (like, in January and February 2007) videos also show up with with 2.5-star ratings in the search results (even if their true rating is, for instance, 4 stars) and on My Account / My Subscriptions. And my question as to what the 1/2 stars on search results mean was not addressed — 1/2 stars are not limited to showing up on the apparently special 2.5-star ratings; I've also seen 3.5-star videos, 4.5 stars, etc.
This one got a lot of attention and was one of the main bugs to inspire a "bed-in" protest among YouTubers in December '06. I haven't seen it happen recently, so YouTube may have gotten this one curtailed. It never should have happened in the first place, though — it's a deadly sin for a messaging system to say it's successfully sent a message and then just throw it away. Success should not be returned until the message has really been sent. If it fails, an error message should be displayed and the user should be given a chance to try again, with all the text they typed intact!!
Update, 2007-02-05: Comments are still vanishing — YouTube may have made the issue less severe, but they haven't fixed it. I had multiple instances of this today.
Update, 2007-04-02: Still not fixed. I noticed that a comment I'd made this afternoon failed to show up, one on a Brookers video saying that I'd reported to YouTube that the video was just sticking on the "Loading..." screen, with a "Waiting for sjl-casing2.sjl.youtube.com..." message in the browser's status bar, and that a few others had also commented that this was occurring. I've now posted that YouTube support responded to my message and said they'd replicated the problem and had reported it to engineering and expected the video to be back up shortly, and that comment did go through. (And as of 2007-04-10, the video in question is back up.)
I also have had a heck of a time posting a couple of comments to this PSA video. Last night I submitted a comment, which YouTube of course claimed had been posted. I then wanted to post a reply to it because I had more to say than would fit in the 500 characters, but since the comment was taking so long to show up, I just posted the followup as an independent comment. I then found that the second comment showed up but the one it was a follow-on to never did. I tried over and over across several days to re-post the original, with various tweaks, but every time it would fail to show up. Seemed pretty clear something in the content was causing YouTube to decide to silently throw it away.
Update, 2007-04-10: Now I can't even reply to someone's comment on one of my own videos. This proves that it's not an issue of videos being in moderated-comment mode (which I already knew since you get a unique message when comments are moderated, rather than the "Thank You. Your comment has been posted!" message) or an issue of video owners somehow always seeing my comments on the site before I can see them and deleting them, yet allowing other comments on the same topic through (incredibly unlikely). Fed up, I finally decided to do a bunch of testing by posting comments to one of my private test videos, to try to figure out what content in my comments YouTube was objecting to. I had some interesting, weird, and very annoying findings.
One thing I found out is that YouTube apparently throws away all comments containing the traditional smiley face — :-) — unless it's at the very beginning of the comment. This won't occur if you use other characters to make the smiley, for instance: 8^). Actually, it appears that the key character YouTube finds to be evil is the colon — you can make smileys with a different character for the eyes but then the usual dash and paren for the nose and mouth and you'll be able to post it anywhere in a comment, not just the beginning. Needless to say, this problem is highly likely to cause people's comments to be discarded — people like to use smileys (that include the ':' character), and not just at the very beginning of their comments!
This is so screwy that I thought maybe I was incorrectly perceiving predictability in YouTube's behavior due to coincidences during what was actually random discarding of comments, but no. It appears to be repeatable. For instance, try the test of posting a comment with a smiley at the beginning of your comment, then one in the middle, then one at the end, then another at the beginning, all in rapid succession, and you'll see that the bookend smiley-at-the-beginning comments will show up but the other two won't. I've repeated this test enough now to feel confident it's not just that YouTube randomly decided to discard comments for a few seconds in the middle of the test then went back to accepting them at the end of it.
I thought maybe this finding would be enough to allow me to post the reply to the comment on my video — by changing the smiley style — but no. This comment:
Um, I don't know that they're <B>ripoffs</B>. 8^) I don't think anyone comes out of a Halloween maze going, "Man, that totally sucked — not one knife made contact. I still have ALL my limbs! WTF?!" Those who enjoy these mazes use their imaginations to fill in the gap between liability-infested reality and horror fantasy. And I suppose some people also get some help from intoxicants to aid with the suspension of disbelief.
would not go through. Yet this one, with the quotes replaced by italics tags, would:
Um, I don't know that they're <B>ripoffs</B>. 8^) I don't think anyone comes out of a Halloween maze going, <I>Man, that totally sucked — not one knife made contact. I still have ALL my limbs! WTF?!</I> Those who enjoy these mazes use their imaginations to fill in the gap between liability-infested reality and horror fantasy. And I suppose some people also get some help from intoxicants to aid with the suspension of disbelief.
And unfortunately the rule YouTube is following for quotes isn't anything straightforward like the "no colon-containing smileys (or maybe any colons?) except at the beginning" behavior. I tried a bunch of test comments containing quotes in various locations at the beginning, end, and in the middle, yet all of those went through. Oh, also, trying to use single-quote / apostrophe (') instead of double-quote in my comment above wouldn't let it go through.
Update, 2007-04-11: I had a tougher time figuring out what YouTube didn't like about the original comment I'd been trying to post to that PSA video. For instance, when I tried to post this test comment fragment:
<I>Don't worry, Billy(?). It was nothing you did or said. The shame and the blame belong to Uncle Ted(?).</I> Love to see that again if anyone has a copy.
it wouldn't go through. I thought perhaps it didn't like the '(?)'s (even though I later tried out the short test comment "Trying a simple(?) comment with paren question-mark paren." and that went through just fine), so I tried this goofy alternate notation:
<I>Don't worry, ?Billy?. It was nothing you did or said. The shame and the blame belong to Uncle ?Ted?.</I> Love to see that again if anyone has a copy.
That did go through. However, when I tried to reincorporate that into the full comment and post it, it wouldn't go through. Tried another variant of the full version with square brackets around those names I wanted to show that I was unsure of (and with quotes instead of italics, since I found during my testing that quotes seemed to be acceptable in this comment, even though they hadn't been in my response to that comment on my video):
Trying yet another variant of my original post to see if it'll work.
Does anyone know whether they still have anti-child-molestation PSAs like this? They seem valuable, but I haven't seen any since the 80s. Memorable lines from the one I describe above were:
"Wait! [or Stop!] You're not supposed to touch me there! Give me back my clothes!"
and:
"Don't worry, [Billy]. It was nothing you did or said. The shame and the blame belong to Uncle [Ted]."
Love to see that again if anyone has a copy.
but no dice. I finally ended up using HTML underlining on those names and explaining what the underlining meant in a follow-on comment rather than being able to use any kind of intuitive notation. (Update, 2007-04-12: Found that that follow-on comment failed to show up as well! ARGH! I had actually tested it beforehand on my private video, but then when I posted the real copy I added another paragraph to the beginning, "Sorry for the duplicate. Dang unreliable YouTube comment software...", and that was apparently enough to get it thrown away. Tried again with the "..." changed to just "." and it went through.)
Until YouTube fixes whatever horrible brokenness is causing these unpredictable yet repeatable comment-discarding behaviors, it seems that the only way to be confident that your comments to people's videos are actually going through is to try posting all your comments to a private video on your own channel first. If you get a notification email saying that you received a comment from yourself, you can be reasonably assured that the comment will show up if you post it to the actual target video as well (though I think there's still a certain amount of random discarding going on as well). You won't necessarily be able to see the comment show up on your test video, however, since YouTube sends the notification immediately yet their webservers don't display the content for long after that. If you hit Reload dozens of times, though, sometimes you'll get a server in their pool that gets content up pretty quickly and you can verify that it was indeed the comment you thought it was that caused the email notification.
I guess either that or you can just leave all punctuation out of all your comments — YouTube doesn't appear to have a problem with any of the alphanumeric characters. Sad that comments posted by the illiterate and the sloppy seem to get preferential treatment on the 'Tube.
BTW, I'm not sure how much of my above findings apply not just to comments but also to private messages. I have indeed experienced instances of messages I've sent vanishing into the ether, but not for some time. However, I don't use that feature very much, tending to use email to converse with YouTubers that I know and comments to converse with those that I don't.
I've reported my above findings to YouTube — I'm very eager to hear their response.
Update, 2007-04-12: I received a response from YouTube. It was unhelpful as it only referred to comments containing URLs and email addresses:
Hi there,
Thanks for your email. I appreciate you helping us in sorting out this problem.
We have recognized some problems with commenting and private messaging. Our engineers looked into these issues and determined that our spam filter was somewhat overactive in some instances. This spam filter was developed to help combat users with racks of machines sending out spam. Messages that contain URLs and email addresses still occasionally get caught by this filter. We're testing a new filter to see how well it catches spam that includes URLs. Based on that performance, we may lift the URL restriction.
User feedback is very important to us, and your comments and ideas will be used to improve the YouTube community.
Hope this helps,
RepresentativeName
The YouTube Team
I've emailed back re-emphasizing that the example comments I gave contained no URLs, email addresses, or anything resembling them. I received this reply:
Hi there,
Thanks for your email. User feedback is very important to us, and your comments and ideas will be used to improve the YouTube community.
It looks like this issue is the result of an issue with our website. It's been reported to our engineers and should be fixed soon!
Hope this helps,
RepresentativeName
The YouTube Team
Definitely a bit more promising than the first response. At least they're properly acknowledging the issue.
Update, 2007-04-27: YES! YouTube finally acknowledged the error of their ways and fixed their comment system so that rather than silently throwing away comments it thinks are spam while claiming they've been posted, it now gives you this error when you hit "Post Comment":
Your comment was not sent, either because it includes a URL or email address.
Now, first off, that's incorrect English — the end of the sentence should be "either because it includes a URL or because it includes an email address" or "because it either includes a URL or an email address", but the far more serious problem is that I've been frequently getting this error when my comment contains nothing even remotely resembling a URL or email address. For instance, I tried to post this reply to a commenter to one of my videos:
No werewolf anymore, but there are two similar instances of lunging creatures. I didn't find the mirror maze especially jolting, but it's definitely a creepy environment to navigate through. I've sent you a friend request so you can see the private vid. I'm not sure when I do that if you get automatically notified of videos I've already shared to that group, though. Let me know if you don't get a video link along with your invite and if not I'll figure out what's necessary to reshare the video.
Their comment system would not let this (under-500-character) comment through, giving the "URL or email address" error above. To see which part of the comment was causing the problem, I posted it in two pieces to one of my private videos (up through "private vid." and then from "I'm not sure" on), and both pieces went through. Tried the full version again and got the original error. Therefore the workaround was to post my reply to the commenter in two pieces.
Update, 2007-04-28: Had this happen again today, with this comment:
Unfortunately, no. :-( I went on it early in the evening because I came upon it with a surprisingly short line, but I didn't want to tape it because it'd get water spots on my camera lens and I'd forgotten to bring lens cleaning supplies. I was planning to go on again as the last thing, but they stopped letting people in just before I got there. Hopefully the theme won't be changed this year and I'll get it on tape.
Now, you'll notice I used a standard colon-containing sad face in that, which I reported above caused YouTube to throw away comments, but this is because I discovered during some experimenting that they'd fixed the colon problem — some of the other (non-colon-containing) comments I mentioned above as silently disappearing now go through as well. Just in case, I tried changing the smiley to 8^(, but that didn't banish the bogus "URL or email address" error. Again, though, I found that splitting the comment (which again, does not exceeed 500 characters) into two pieces (up through "cleaning supplies." and then starting with "I was planning") allowed it go through.
Update, 2007-04-30: I've reported this must-split issue (and the error grammar problem) to YouTube.
Update, 2007-05-01: I received a generic response that acknowledged the problem: "Thanks for your email. It looks like the issue you're having is the result of an issue with our website. It's been reported to our engineers and should be fixed soon!".
Update, 2007-06-09: Have not had the problem recur lately, so I tried re-posting the above two example comments to one of my private videos. The first one goes through now, but the second one still gives the bogus "URL or email address" error (and the incorrect grammar on the error also hasn't been fixed).
Update, 2007-07-31: Had another occurrence of this today. Tried some variations on the punctuation of my comment, but it wouldn't go through. Tried posting it on a private video, though, and it went through. Tried again on the real video and got the bogus error again. However, I then tried reloading the page of the real video and tried again, and that time it went through. Weird — perhaps YouTube made some incompatible update to their spam-filtering interfaces in between the time I loaded the page and tried to make the comment the first time? I also took this opportunity to retry the second comment above — still gets the bogus error.
Many times I've wanted to post a comment containing a URL, whether to give fellow viewers a link to an original author's video that someone has posted a copy of without attribution, or to give a link to a page with more information on the subject of the video, or whatever. The worst part is that if you include a URL, YouTube will lie to you with "Thank You. Your comment has been posted!" and then silently throw away your comment. Argh!! Again, silent data loss is totally unacceptable for a messaging system.
Even comments with URLs pointing to other videos on youtube.com appear to be thrown away (although I have seen at least one comment containing such a URL without obfuscation — perhaps it was posted before the filtering was instituted).
What makes this much worse is that there's nothing in the Help (or elsewhere, that I've seen) that tells you that URLs aren't allowed, so the majority of people posting URLs are no doubt ones doing it innocently and legitimately, who don't find out for quite some time (if ever) that all those comments they posted containing URLs got thrown away despite YouTube claiming it had accepted them. Come on, actual spammers are going to find out quite quickly that the URLs posted by their automated systems aren't going through, so this use of security through obscurity is folly. Plus spammers don't mind just giving the top-level URL for a website (vs. legitimate commenters who would more often be pointing to a specific URL), and it's pretty difficult to catch and reject every possible obfuscation of a domain name (nor should they try).
YouTube already has a system for users to mark comments as spam, which is probably the best way to deal with the issue. I mean, by far the worst spam problem on YouTube right now is the "Katu Lata Kulu" / "LATUALATUKA" chain comment and all its variants being propagated by brainless imbeciles, and those have no URLs. The best thing YouTube can do to help with both types of spam is to quickly ban any account marked by lots of accounts (or distinct IPs?) as being as a spammer (with some sort of appeal process to further prevent abuse).
If they wanted to go beyond that, they could institute some kind of trust system (one that would be clearly communicated!) where you'd only be allowed to post URLs once you'd gained some karma points by having your account for awhile, watching a lot of videos, posting videos (that don't all have 1-star ratings), etc.
One other possibility would be to do content hashing of comments and prevent people from posting comments with the same content over and over. This would have to carefully tuned so that short comments likely to be legitimately repeated ("Funny stuff!", "That was great!", etc.) would not be blocked. Only longish content should be affected by the system. This would be effective on both types of spam mentioned above, though since spammers would probably programmatically insert random text to alter the hash, it'd be more effective against chain comments propagated by humans.
Update, 2007-04-12: As noted in the above item, YouTube is currently considering dropping the undocumented ban on URLs, which in itself is good news, but not if they're achieving that by using Bayesian spam filters with a very high level of false positives, as seems to be the case.
This is another of YouTube's ill-conceived anti-spam measures. Actually, the idea itself is quite reasonable, but their implementation of it is completely bogus. I hit the limit all the time — it's very easy to do when watching a lot of not-too-long videos and commenting on many of them. Spammers are either going to try to post comments on a ton of different videos, or only on a few popular ones (in which case the current system won't catch them anyway), so I think they should be able to raise the thresholds for this greatly from where they're currently set. If that weren't sufficient for some reason (spammers being willing to post their spams over quite a long period of time — something that usually doesn't happen since the stuff they advertise is generally fly-by-night), they could use a trust-based system like I described above to allow trusted users to post more and more comments within a shorter and shorter duration.
Update, 2007-05-09: You can now perform a CAPTCHA (with no alternative option for visually impaired people, I guess their thinking being that there aren't many such people frequenting YouTube) to continue posting after you've posted four comments within "too short" a time. A pretty reasonable solution, though I'd still prefer it if "trusted users" didn't have to be periodically interrogated by the system this way.
For a period of time this month, this issue was occurring every single time I'd get notification of a new comment to one of my videos or that one of my comments to someone else's video had been replied to. I'd go visit the link and refresh, and wait, and refresh, and wait, and sometimes it'd take a very long time before the comment that it said was supposed to be there would actually show up. Occasionally I would accidentally hit Refresh one too many times, and I'd see the comment show up but then disappear again on the next refresh. This implies that they have a bunch of load-balanced servers that don't all get content at the same time. I sent customer service a message suggesting they fix their email notification system to not send you the email until all (or at least the majority — there are probably chances for pathological conditions) of the servers actually have the comment in question. They responded that this was caused by site load and they were working on getting synchronization of content to happen faster (which doesn't address my point about the timing of the notification).
This slow-to-appear comments problem also is an issue when you're just leaving a comment (and are trying to refresh the page afterwards to verify it's there, or to follow up to it with some more text that didn't fit within the 500 characters). Because of the above-described issues with comments being silently thrown away, you can never be sure if your comment isn't showing up because YouTube's site is being slow to update, or because it's vanished into the ether, leading to wasted time waiting and hitting refresh, and the posting of duplicate copies of comments when you assume they got lost yet they're actually just delayed.
Update, 2007-04-24: In the past few days, comments have been showing up on the site much sooner after the email notification than in the past — generally instantaneously rather than after hours. And it hasn't even been necessary to hit Refresh a million times to get a server that displays the comment. If this keeps up, it won't be necessary to always make comment test posts to a private video to make sure they're going to go through — one'll be able to just post to the intended video and then hit Refresh to make sure it got there. (I've noticed that YouTube has been processing uploaded videos much faster recently as well. I wonder if they suddenly expanded their set of servers from the ones they had pre-Google to a huge cluster of Google hardware.)
Almost all web pages that allow you to send an SMS message have a JavaScript counter that starts at 160 characters and counts down as you type. YouTube really needs this for its 500-character-limit comments. I hit the limit all the time and have to copy and paste my comment into XEmacs and do a trial-and-error trim, run 'what-cursor-position', trim, run 'what-cursor-position'... loop until it's under 500 characters. Lots of people wouldn't even have access to an editor that does a character count (or wouldn't know that they had a program with that feature, and how to use it).
This occurs, for instance, on videos uploaded from cellphones that use a 352x288 (CIF) resolution (like my Treo 700p), which equates to a 1.2 aspect ratio. At least this one is fairly easy to work around, assuming you have a capable video editing program — you just need to pre-render to 320x240 yourself before uploading. You're out of luck if you're interested in using YouTube's feature to upload videos directly from cellphones when you're away from a computer, though.
Suddenly any video that includes the keyword "crazy" lists several copies of 'Gnarls Barkley - "Crazy"' as the top related results. This is even if the original video includes tons of other keywords besides "crazy", and the Gnarls Barkley videos include no matches of those — e.g. only the keywords "Gnarls Barkley Crazy". In the past, it preferred multi-keyword matches over single-keyword matches. It seems like the algorithm has been changed to now give a stronger weight to a match of a keyword in the original video with a title word in so-called related videos, and perhaps also putting an overly strong weight on the ratings of those related videos, and how many people have rated them. I think this is completely the wrong way to go, and the poor "related" results it digs up are not limited to the case of the "crazy" keyword.
Update, 2007-01-30: I heard back from YouTube on this issue. They declined to answer with:
Hi there,
Thanks for your email.
Due to disclosure of company content policies, I am unable to answer your question.
Hope this helps,
RepresentativeName
The YouTube Team
Guys, if you're going to be deliberately unhelpful due to "trade secrets" (which seems silly — Google doesn't make the basic design and operation of their PageRank algorithm a secret, for instance), at least leave off the utterly obnoxious "Hope this helps". Ah well, at least a "no comment" answer is better than no response.
Update, 2007-02-04: Yay! Looks like YouTube fixed this. My videos (and those of others) that include the keyword "crazy" are no longer showing the stupid Gnarls Barkley videos (or other high-rated videos with "crazy" in the title, like Aerosmith's "Crazy" music video) to be related. Looks like multi-keyword matches are again being preferred. Kudos to YouTube for fixing this one quickly, even though they declined to even acknowledge it as an issue and have left my proposed topic to discuss it on the YouTube group just sitting there Pending Approval indefinitely.
Update, 2007-02-05: Discovered today thanks to a spammer utilizing the feature to put their comments in bold that within the past few days, YouTube started allowing HTML in comments. Cool, I guess, but not only is there no documentation on what tags are allowed and disallowed — there's no official mention anywhere I can find that you can use HTML period! I have successfully used <B> and <I> in comments. I tried using <A> (pointing to a youtube.com video URL), but that comment appears to have been silently discarded.
Update, 2007-04-24: YouTube offers the ability to mark "General Messages" as spam, but not friend invites. I've received multiple friend invites from users with no videos who are just advertising some other site with a link in their channel description. You can block further messages from the spamming user by clicking over to their profile (though not from the message interface as you can for general messages), but you can't mark their messages as spam, which I imagine counts more towards getting them suspended. I reported this missing feature to YouTube and they responded within a few hours, but their response was completely worthless, giving me instructions on how to decline a friend request.
Update, 2007-04-25: I responded to their reply explaining that I understood how to use the interface and reiterated what it was I was suggesting. They responded that my feedback had been passed along to the product team.
Update, 2007-07-09: The title of this section originally only mentioned friend invites. Adding to that, there's no way to mark sent videos, subscription requests, or channel comments as spam either (also now reported to the 'Tube). One workaround I became aware of, though (in this video about LisaNova's rampant use of a spamming bot), is to visit www.youtube.com/flag_user?username=user and report that the user is using a spamming program. Seems like there used to be a "report this user" link so you wouldn't have to construct the URL manually, but I don't see it anymore...
Update, 2007-05-03: There's no email notification when you receive comments to your channel (vs. to a video). You just have to stumble upon them. Likewise no way to reply to a channel comment like you can to video comments — you can only post a separate comment with text referring to the other and hope that the original commenter eventually discovers it. And strangest of all, the interface gives you the ability to attach a video to a channel comment, but no link to the video actually appears. I've reported these issues to YouTube.
Update, 2007-05-04: YouTube responded with a generic "Thanks for your email. User feedback is very important to us, and your comments and ideas will be used to improve the YouTube community." email.
Update, 2008-09-28: Some time in the last four months, YouTube finally implemented email notification of channel comments. All the other problems appear to remain. In addition, though they finally implemented a character counter for normal comments, they have not done so for channel comments, and I've had lots of problems trying to post comments to my own profile. They'll fail with some uselessly generic message like "Please check your comment", so I don't know if it's that they're too long, that they're hitting false positive spam filter checks, or what.
Update, 2007-06-13: YouTube just recently changed the video upload / edit interface so that United States is no longer the topmost entry in the Country list and English is no longer the topmost entry in the Language list. I always find it annoying when U.S.-based websites for whom the majority of customers are in the U.S. make you dig for the country name. Especially annoying in this case since they had it the convenient way before and then removed the convenience. If they insist on not making it by default convenient for the majority of their customers, it would be nice if they would have it remember default values for those settings per account.
A worse problem is that in changing this, they introduced a bug where if you set the Language field for your videos to English, after the save they show up as Chinese. Not sure if this is affecting search results and such or if it's just a display bug. I've reported these issues to YouTube.
Update, 2007-06-14: Received an email from YouTube saying they appreciated me bringing the issue to their attention and that they're currently investigating the situation.
Update, 2007-06-15: Later in the day yesterday they changed the video upload / edit interface to a new design (which, BTW, has one nice aspect in that you no longer have to wait around until a video has finished uploading to be able to make settings on it — all setttings, rather than just the Public / Private setting, are now on the pre-uploading page). This new design does properly default to English for the language (on my account — hopefully people using the site in other languages get appropriate defaults for them). There's no longer a Country field. Instead, there's now a single "Map Video" field that for existing videos holds the data that used to be in the Location field. This field controls an embedded Google Map and can include the country (default is U.S., at least for my account).
Unfortunately there are a couple of regressions with this new design. One is just an annoyance rather than a bug or loss of functionality — every time you upload a video you have explicitly click on "choose options" for the Broadcast Options, Date and Map Options, and Sharing Options sections to be able to set those options. These extra, unnecessary clicks are annoying. I guess they did it this way partially to prevent the page load from being slowed down by Google Maps AJAX calls if you're not going to be setting the location (which no doubt most people don't — up till YouTube hasn't apparently used the location data anywhere in the interface). I'd prefer it if they left the other options visible by default and only made the map itself be something you'd have to expand if desired. Note also that every time you expand the Date and Map options for a video you'll get an error if the location isn't text that Google Maps understands how to locate. Previously the field was just a freeform text field, so there'll be many locations in existing videos that Google can't parse — I went through all my videos and fixed the locations to be bare addresses.
The other regression is more serious:
Update, 2007-06-15: It's apparently no longer possible to share videos with a custom group defined in your YouTube contacts. Where there used to be a radio button (actually the switch to checkboxes is an improvement) with "Family", "Friends", and any custom Friends & Contacts groups you'd defined, now there are just "Family" and "Friends" checkboxes. If you go edit existing videos you have that were shared to a special group you'd defined, you'll find the interface says the video is shared to no one. Worse, I experimentally verified that people in the special group can no longer view the private video.
Worse still, I tried moving the contacts I had in a custom group into the normal Friends group and sharing the videos to that, but found that if I check "Friends" on a video and hit "Update Video Info", the setting does not persist (re-expand — grr — Broadcast Options on the "Video details have been updated!" page and it'll be unchecked again), and the people in the Friends group are denied if they try to view the private video. Also, a smaller bug I ran into while testing this is that I had 0 contacts in my Family group, then moved a couple of contacts into there for testing, then deleted them out of there, and now the interface shows "Family (1)". Click on that heading and no users are listed.
As usual when YouTube changes site functionality, the documentation has not been updated. It still claims you can share videos with any contact list, not just the default "Family" and "Friends". I have reported these issues to YouTube.
Update, 2007-06-19: I received a response from YouTube:
Hi there,
Thanks for your notification. The issues you're facing with private videos on our site after the recent site changes is the result of an issue with our website. We've reported it to our engineers and should be fixed soon.
Regards, and thanks for your patience.
RepresentativeName
The YouTube Team
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Dan Harkless
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