YouTube

Japanese Wave Pool

| Richard

Now I don’t know about you, but I like a bit of space to myself which is why I’d probably cope badly living in a more densely populated area and in particular somewhere like Tokyo.

So as you can imagine I’m not looking forward to travelling this weekend as it’s a Bank Holiday, but at least it’s nowhere as hatstand as Tokyo:

“It’s summertime here in Tokyo, and since we’re in the middle of the Obon holiday week a lot of Tokyoites have left town for the countryside, leaving a strangely empty city behind. Those who stick around or come in from the countryside pack just about every tourist spot to the gills. We went to the Tokyo Summerland today to catch some sun, and could barely move!

From here.

This is what he’s talking about:

The Trouble with YouTube (Redux)

| Richard

I have received a reply to my support query about marking comments as spam from YouTube:

“Thanks for your email. The “Mark as Spam” feature is there to help us recognize messages which are spam. If you see any comments which are spam, please click on “Mark as Spam” and the comment will be removed from the site. This helps us keep the site clean and spam free.”

Now, maybe it’s just me, but when I upload videos I allow comments but only if they’re approved by me, i.e. I get a notification of a comment, go to the video and approve or delete them or indeed mark them as Spam. In my case, the reply that “the comment will be removed” doesn’t appear to be correct. When I mark a comment as Spam, it shows as being marked that way, but as soon as I reload the video page or log out and log in again, the comment is still there awaiting approval and has to be manually deleted.

So what’s the point in marking the message as Spam, especially as they’re almost exclusively from “fire and forget” YouTube accounts? All it does is make more work for me.

The Trouble with YouTube

| Richard

Well it’s all very well and good being able to easily upload videos and set various options for comments and the like, but what happens when there’s a feature you don’t understand?

Some of my videos on an alternative profile are quite popular and as a result of that a lot of people are subscribing to the video ‘channel’ which I presume is partly responsible for introducing more subscribers viral marketing stylee.

But with that comes the issue of Comment Spamming, mainly for those tacky webcam pr0n sites. Now, all comments for my videos are moderated so they don’t actually get seen until I go along and approve them or otherwise. There’s also a “Spam” link which seems to hide the content but the username is still shown, at least to me, but reloading the video page shows the full comment to me again, so I then have to delete it. So what exactly does the Spam link do? Try searching for “spam” or “comment spam” or whatever in the Help Centre and you’ll see there’s nothing at all about that.

I also had to raise a query about “Bulletins”: do they go to all your subscribers or just your friends? I’m still not entirely sure, but I suspect the latter.

Maybe they should spend some of those billions of a proper, full FAQ?