Donations and a New Storage Server

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DriftRoot
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Post by DriftRoot » Wed Oct 08, 2008 7:47 pm

JaddziaDax wrote:
Donating should be at most a four click process. It should not involve a contract, pledge, or some type of thing that is meant to reign me in and feel like I'm obligated to the site.
and the "pledge" thing kind of annoyed me too, but the process never really confused me... but that's just me... I've seen several times on the forums where it's confused others, and thats where I agree that the page/process could definitely use cleaning.
There is a lot about this site that could use cleaning. Back awhile ago when Savia was updating the FAQ, I volunteered to rummage through a lot of it and make suggestions about improvements. The term "snowball effect" applies to what I found. If a revolutionary new streaming video...scenario...was implemented, along with renovations to the donation/pledge page(s), then I wonder if an entire site overhaul might be in our future.

I still don't quite understand how streaming video would greatly benefit this site. We don't know that it would drive more donating traffic here. Plus, are people here still going to post their vids on the Tube? Probably, so why should someone on the Tube come here to watch something they can watch over there? Plus, if massive changes start happening over there with AMVs due to copyright issues, that raises the question of whether a-m-v.org wants to also be even more exposed to such things by jumping on the streaming video bandwagon - if copyright issues force AMVs off the Tube, the same thing could happen here, possibly more easily, making streaming video a lot more trouble than it's worth.

If streaming video is the wave of the future (or rather, the wave of now), then ok...but we're not dealing with harmless backyard videos of our pets, here, we've got music and video copyright concerns that go from worrying about having videos forcefully removed from this site (which has already happened) to getting uploaders in legal hot water (an extreme scenario, but it's a possibility). Also, if it was a donator-only perk, couldn't that be construed as paying for access to streaming video/music that none of us has any authority whatsoever to be charging for access to?

It's all such a gray area...I know. But what I'm trying to say is that I would just really, really hate for this site to take any more risks than it already does. I don't know, maybe adding streaming video is not perceived as much of a risk, but I personally don't feel very comfortable with the idea. :(
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Corran
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Post by Corran » Wed Oct 08, 2008 8:45 pm

I don't understand why people think streaming video as a donator-only perk would be an even greater liability than what the site currently does now...
JaddziaDax wrote:making streaming viewable for donators only for the purposes of testing the system seems reasonable... but if we do implement it, I don't think that it should remain donator only...
If it wasn't donator-only we would be missing out on a major donator perk. Numerous people have told me this is a feature they would be willing to donate for.
Driftroot wrote:Also, if it was a donator-only perk, couldn't that be construed as paying for access to streaming video/music that none of us has any authority whatsoever to be charging for access to?
All users would still have the same access they do now.
bluetrain wrote:Also with all the different formats that are/have been uploaded to the org; mpgs, divx, xvid, movs, h264, wmv etc etc would this pose issues with what would be able to be streamed - or would streaming videos have to be uploaded seperately by the editor?
Video encoding would be done server-side and has been successfully tested with numerous codecs and containers including those you've mentioned.

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rubyeye
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Post by rubyeye » Wed Oct 08, 2008 8:51 pm

I remember some time ago you did a "system clean up" where you deleted a whole bunch of old/duplicate videos, those that were incomplete, or some kind of criteria like removing those encoded using an outdated format (.mpg) and recompressing them using a newer,smaller format (.avi or .mp4). It might be time to do another clean up as well as upgrading the server.

I have to disapprove of the "streaming" idea namely because virtually most of the videos hosted here can already be found on U-tube (especially older ones). I can attest because nearly all of my videos are uploaded there by other people, without any knowledge or action on my part. There's no point in us doing it if another service is already being used for that purpose, plus it might draw even more attention to us which most people are fearful of.

I do my part pledging and donating at least once a year and as much as I can. I've always promised that if I came into a shitload of money (like winning the lottery) this site would be the first I'd "share a little of my wealth with".

Maybe you should have a mandatory member's fee - there's like over 700,000 members to this site, if everyone donated $1, you'd be set. (Come On People, that's a fucking buck!). This idea might also have been considered, but I'm not sure.

I like the auction idea, it might be something members could also participate in like having some kind of an ORG auction where we contribute something people might want to buy and the proceeds go directly to the site. For right now the hard drives you have would be a good start.

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JaddziaDax
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Post by JaddziaDax » Wed Oct 08, 2008 9:12 pm

I guess the way I see it is that people will complain that VIEWING streaming is free on other sites, so why should they have to pay to use it here? :/ However, I'm not saying that everyone should have access to all parts of streaming, I'm just saying that the viewing part should be available for everyone if we are gonna do it...

Although, I think that donators should have control over weather or not they want their videos streamed here, if they choose to not stream or to stream... as for the "default" status of videos being streamed, I guess that would be up to someone else to decide, because I don't know what would be best in that situation.

I would donate reguardless weather streaming was added as a "perk", I can always look up and watch a video on a streaming site if I really want to watch it streamed.

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SQ
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Post by SQ » Wed Oct 08, 2008 9:26 pm

rubyeye wrote: I have to disapprove of the "streaming" idea namely because virtually most of the videos hosted here can already be found on U-tube (especially older ones).
...
There's no point in us doing it if another service is already being used for that purpose...
I disagree.
Take.. Blogging, for instance. There's livejournal, blogger, xanga, ebloggy, and countless other blogging host sites out there. Yet we have a journaling service? Why, because it helps keep our users here.

I mean sure, it's not as full-featured as any other blog service, but it helps keep this site all-inclusive. There are countless instant messenging services, yet myspace and facebook have made their own. Why? Because it keeps it all-inclusive.

If I wanted to waste my time looking for a youtube AMV, then I'd be on youtube.
But if I wanted an AMV that (supposedly) didn't suck, I'd be on this site. And if it happened to have a streaming feature, all the better for me! Less work on my part.

Just because it's been done before doesn't mean it can't be done again. There are countless file hosting sites, and there were file sharing sites before the donut existed, yet we still pushed for local hosting anyway.

I'm not sure about the other concerns, but this one in particular boggles my mind. I'm sure whatever Phade and crew have cooked up is a better alternative to youtube, because frankly I can't stand youtube's conversion process. It makes everything look like utter shit. The other sites do a much better job of maintaining the quality, if only a little bit.
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Vivaldi
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Post by Vivaldi » Wed Oct 08, 2008 9:35 pm

rubyeye wrote: Maybe you should have a mandatory member's fee - there's like over 700,000 members to this site, if everyone donated $1, you'd be set. (Come On People, that's a fucking buck!). This idea might also have been considered, but I'm not sure.
As great as that'd be, the instant having to pay becomes mandatory, the site loses whatever leniency they had for being non-profit. As they'd be officially making money off copyrighted material. Also, I'd guess a fair number of those 700,000 are teens without paypal, and whose parents would be very against them sending any amount of money to some strange site.
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bluetrain
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Post by bluetrain » Thu Oct 09, 2008 1:18 am

I suppose its a relief that the files will be converted by the admins - as that itself would cause a lot of hassle and many people wouldn't want to do it. But it still uses more space, which is the problem - not bandwidth. I know i would still upload my video as well as have the streaming option so you're just ending up with 2 videos that might total 80mb rather than one that totals 60mb. And in the case of MEPs it would be like having a whole seperate video online as the filesize of the flv would be very comparable. It just doesn't seem like a way to save on space at all if you're going to have to convert it yourself - as people will be forced to upload their video anyway. There would be no "Streaming only option" unless you were to delete the downloadable video after the streaming version was set up and then you may as well have just kept the downloadable version because chances are someone will want to keep it.

To me, correct me if i'm wrong, that doesn't seem to save space at all, but rather do the opposite.
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Orwell
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Post by Orwell » Thu Oct 09, 2008 3:43 am

To raise new funds I propose we have a bidding war. If enough votes in the community go to kick them out, donations will be required to either $# or double of what the potential banee have donated, and if the member puts up more money than those willing kick the person out, another pledge and potential donation received.
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godix
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Post by godix » Thu Oct 09, 2008 3:45 am

Orwell wrote:To raise new funds I propose we have a bidding war. If enough votes in the community go to kick them out, donations will be required to either $# or double of what the potential banee have donated, and if the member puts up more money than those willing kick the person out, another pledge and potential donation received.
I second this. Lets see if we can get bidding on Sukunai so high that he has to take out some debt to stick around. Either we're rid of him or he'll have one less thing to be an arrogant idiot about.
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Scintilla
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Post by Scintilla » Thu Oct 09, 2008 5:37 am

SQ wrote:I'm not sure about the other concerns, but this one in particular boggles my mind. I'm sure whatever Phade and crew have cooked up is a better alternative to boochsack, because frankly I can't stand boochsack's conversion process. It makes everything look like utter shit. The other sites do a much better job of maintaining the quality, if only a little bit.
Have you tried the "watch in high quality" option recently, for those videos that have it? There's also an option in your preferences to always view high quality versions if available. The upshot is that stuff can look passable now if the uploader provided a high-quality original.
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