Board Thread:Suggestions/@comment-25995065-20150227040939

One of the most-complained about policies I know of on this wiki is the one that requires users to link to videos using Viewpure. The purpose of this policy is understandable&mdash;sometimes videos actually do have some obnoxious and inappropriate comments. However, requiring users to take the extra step of using Viewpure is a bit unnecessary and can be a hassle. It's inconvenient on mobile, and during fast conversations in chat, it takes even longer to get the link ready. And of course, not everyone is actually going to care about comments or see them. So rather than having an extra policy for moderators to have to enforce, and another step users have to take to link to a video, I have a better suggestion (actually 2).

Suggestion 1
There are ways that you can hide YouTube comments on YouTube itself. This article on LifeHacker lists some options to remove those kinds of things on YouTube, or other things that might bother users. This would allow users who actually don't want to see comments to have them disabled, but at the same time allow for other users to link to YouTube itself quickly and safely. This is easier from a moderation standpoint for because moderators don't have to check if the comments are appropriate or not; if a user finds an inappropriate comment and actually has a problem with it, the moderator (or anyone else in chat) can suggest one of the options listed in that LifeHacker article. Other times, chances are it won't bother anyone about the YouTube link. And for people like me, sometimes I'm actually curious what kinds of comments something has received, which would mean I wouldn't have to copy the Viewpure URL and convert it back to YouTube.com. Also, Viewpure doesn't work for some users at all, I've heard, so this would allow them to still see the video that was linked (assuming YouTube works for them too).

Suggestion 2
This is a more rudimentary and possibly annoying suggestion, but it's also a possibility. It's possible to write a script that converts YouTube links to Viewpure links after they're shared in chat. This ensures that links are to Viewpure. The annoyance that this could cause however would be 1) if the script was buggy or YouTube updated it's URL format, the script might not work as it should and could possibly break chat, and 2) if a user actually wanted to link to the YouTube URL, the script could prevent them from doing that. This isn't the suggestion I'd favor, but it's a possibility. It could also possibly be something that users can enable in the user options menu, but not something forced upon every user.

Of course, with either of the suggestions, users are still responsible for making sure the video content itself is appropriate to link to in chat. These are just suggestions to solve the requirement of using Viewpure, which I find annoying and I know many other users do as well. 