Site Updates 2014/1/25

• Added the ability to "join" a language page. This will add your username to the "members" tab, and should also let you be notified via email when new posts are made on that language's discussion page (assuming your user preferences are set up to receive notification emails).
• Added private messaging. This should work as you'd expect. Your unread message count displays as a link next to your username at the top of the page. You can send someone a message if you're on their user page. You can only send/receive messages if you have an account. I'm planning on adding a user preference to notify via email when a new message is received.

Edit:

• Also, if you take a link to a video page (e.g. http://nerdfighteria.info/video/65/b4TVGUUt65Y) and replace the channel name/id with a 1, it'll redirect to a hankroll. Example: http://nerdfighteria.info/video/1/b4TVGUUt65Y

ahh wow these are brilliant features thanks so much! 

Hey guys, is there anyway we can change the text format? The entry on the 2007 P4A is using the "uniform" text format (the one that makes the text line up on both sides) and at the bottom line, every time there is a space between words, there's a bit to much space in between the words. 

-Ayo

Thanks so much for fixing the timestamp issues!

You must really be desperate to be that thankful.

Yep that's me, my IT knowledge extends to "turn it off and on again"

kitchensink108 should make a computer programming class or should teach one........and you should sign up.

The only problem with this is that sometimes people will be listed in the description or transcript but not actually take part in the video. If you're looking to see all videos with Maureen Johnson, it can be a pain to search through all the videos where John/Hank has mentioned her at one point or linked to one of her books in the description. I do understand where you're coming from though. 

That's actually the issue I had when Karen Kavett was mentioned earlier. I was trying to see how many videos she'd been in, but because she does graphics work so often, she gets mentioned all the time in youtube videos that she doesn't actually appear in.

I agree that in some ways credits is kind of a hack to make up for a lack of transcribed videos. If every video was perfectly transcribed, and each person that appears in a video had their name spelled out fully, there'd be much less of a need for credits.

But one of my goals for this site has just been to organize nerdfighteria's videos, and make it easier for people to find videos they're looking for. And while it still shouldn't be difficult to transcribe all the main channels, there are side channels (especially hankgames) that would arguably be a waste of time to fully transcribe.

It also adds more opportunity for people to volunteer, as there are (I believe) a good number of nerdfighters out there who are more interested in helping out in keeping the site organized than they are in transcribing videos.

So I'm really not sure how useful/popular credits will be to people, but I can see enough potential to justify at least getting the feature in place and seeing how people take it from there.

Thank you. I read the quote in one of those world domination games.

Back to wiki related discussion, I would like to ask you whose bright idea were the credits anyway? I mean, it is nice to mention the people who contributed in making the video as in CrashCourse and Scishow, but the credits are already there, on the screen. They may not be spoken out loud but they are there. So in a sense, we are re-doing what they have already done by putting the credits in. I would also like to congratulate the guy who got us into this mess because that has  certainly given us much to discuss and think about.

In other Nerdfighteria Wiki news, should we have like certain people managing certain parts of the wiki? That way everyone won't have to go around every part of the wiki checking for spam or articles named " Green Johnny" and also we can have this sort of division of labour thing in where every one looks after their section of the wiki. I guess we can use this system to build upon the minor articles that have only like one sentence such as "Karen Kavett is a Nerdfighter, vlogger and graphic designer"

What do you guys think?

"What an artist the world loses in me"
-Emperor Nero

At the moment the credits are more being used for who was actually in the video, not who was involved in the making of it. On channels like SciShow and CrashCourse this is written in the video at the end, so I agree that the credits may be less useful on those channels.
However, on other channels like vlogbrothers and hankschannel the people in the video often aren't introduced at all, so the credits feature is much more useful here.
The main purpose of the credits (so far as I can tell) is for people to be able to find a list of all videos including one person with much greater accuracy. 
The credits feature is really useful for that because a lot of the time people included in the video won't be named in the description, so by using the search bar people can a) miss videos that they are unnamed but included in and b) have to look through a whole bunch of videos where the person is named in the description, title or transcript, but not actually in the video.
So basically for a lot of videos they won't be very useful, but I personally think that they're a really good feature for less formal channels, as well as just the general organisation of the wiki. 

This would be the place to suggest new names.

non sequitur, what video does she appear in?

In general, we'd like to keep the list from ballooning, but Karen might be appropriate to add. What do others think?

She's part of "Is Charlie McDonnell Single dot com" (http://nerdfighteria.info/video/50/zQ0ZCOXGr5s/1)

I'm not sure how many video's she's a part of, and she doesn't really talk that much, it was just more of a general "Where should I suggest names or are we keeping it as it is now?" sort of thing. 

We could come up with some sort of rough rule, like "anyone who could be credited in at least three videos can be added." Or maybe that should be five or so. Or we could have a rule (e.g. 3+ videos), but a separate rule that anyone with a wiki entry could be credited. 

I don't know if Karen Kavett qualifies under the first rule, but she would under the second.

For suggesting new people, we could either do it here on the discussion page, or I can add another tab to the "submit video/category" form.

More discussion would be good for all of this.

Also don't forget Karen's story about how she almost didn't make it to Montana.

I think it makes sense that anyone with a wiki entry should be in the credits list.

I also like the idea of a rule for something like 5+ appearances can be credited. My vote for the number would be five—three seems like it might be too low, but I don't really know what would be best. Perhaps it would be best to decide these on a case-by-case basis.

Yeah, I think the "5-video" rule works best as a rough guideline, mostly as an indicator for whether adding that person would be particularly useful. If at some point I redesign how the credit list options are displayed on a video, though, so that it's easy to use a much larger list, then we could expand the guideline to something like "if they have a wiki entry, they can be credited."

This complicates things as there is an abundant amount of people that have wiki entries however have not been in a single vlogbrothers video or had Hank or John in their videos. We have all of teamhypercube, we have AlexDay, we have so many others. So in that case, what's the point of crediting them if they've never been in a video?

I think 5 videos would ideally make sense, except I'm not sure exactly how we would keep track of how many videos people have been in, without crediting them. Like I just watched a video with Nick Jenkins on camera, and thought about how many other videos he's been in in the past... the office tour, and I think a few hankgames... but I'm not sure.

Perhaps we could start a new thread here for each person and collectively try to find 5 people, but this could just result it a ton of short comments, each with a video name.

"If s/he has a wiki entry" might also be a problem, since could just make a new entry for whomever s/he wants, even if, as Ayo said, we've never once seen his/her face.

I hate to just bash on ideas without offering any myself... but I'm going to have to think about this some more.

I wasn't imagining the 5-video rule as "name me five videos, and we'll add the person," something rougher like "yeah, this person was in these three videos, and I'm pretty sure showed up in a few others but I don't remember which..."

But we could do something more organized like you suggested. It could be easiest if I just spent a couple hours coding something new to handle the vetting process, but let me know if anyone has other ideas for this.

How about if they make regular appearances in a series then they can be credited? But this has its own problem has Scishow talks how has guests and MentalFloss has occasional guests and we can't just leave them uncredited. So😬. The best part about this is seeing where all this is going. We are going somewhere, just that we don't know where.

"If a sailor does not know to which port the is sailing, no wind is favorable" -Some philosopher from the era of ancient Greeks and Romans.

There are some people (like Maureen Johnson) who are only in videos every couple years, but over time that means she's had a decent number of vlogbrothers appearances. I wouldn't call her "regularly appearing," though.

Also, I think the credits idea is most useful for people like that, as then you can just go to their wiki entry and immediately see all the videos they've been in without needing to search or sort through hundreds of other videos.

For people who are regularly occurring, "credits" is more of a trivial thing. You can easily see who's in a video without playing it, and you could do some fun statistical analysis on their videos, but their wiki entry might list literally thousands of videos, which I can't imagine being incredibly useful to anyone.

I would suggest a separate submission page linked from the Credits menu on a video. This could be populated with wiki entries from the People section or allow users to type in their own names. Once a name gets submitted on five different videos, admins can add the person to the list and to the videos.

Sorry! I accidentally posted the "fixed" one twice. I meant it currently links to here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0yQB0AUgZc

This is an interesting situation where the same video was uploaded to two different channels. John accidentally uploaded it to sparksflyup, which is the one here, and then uploaded it to vlogbrothers, where it was supposed to go.

So we should probably swap which one is here. Should the other video, though, be moved somewhere else or just discarded?

Nit: The formatting is kept in the newest post of a thread, but not in the previous posts.

Sorry this is a really dumb question but I was wondering what and/or who an admin is? 

Admins are users who have more site actions available to them, things like deactivating channels, adding videos, or re-assigning videos to different channels. Right now there are four: me, Bobidou23, stephenwade, and runalovegood.

With apologies for being such an idealist...
Could there be a way to apply default credits to all videos in a channel or category, like sexplanations or thebrainscoop?
Do you think behind-the-camera credits (Danica, Mark, Nick, etc.) are necessary, and, if so, should they be separate from the on-screen folks?

And the most absurd idea: Could the credited videos, instead of being listed in a box in the profile picture, be arranged in monthly calendars? Maybe, like a category page, the article would link to it, and its contents would also be next to the calendar; clicking on the name in the video page would lead to the calendar.

I don't think we should automatically apply credits.

I agree that, at least for some channels or categories, it might be useful to apply default credits (John, for example, is in every Crash Course US History video). However, the problem I see is that if credits are automatically added, we won't be able to know whether they have been manually reviewed. In the future, we won't know whether the credits on a video might be missing someone since they were automatically added.

I'm not sure behind-the-camera credits would be useful. As a viewer, I care more about which videos Ana Pond has appeared in than about which videos Danica has helped with. Maybe the name should be changed to something else (appearances, maybe?), because as described the feature simply shows who appears in the video.

Thoughts?

Possibly related to stephenwade's behind-the-camera comment, should "appearances" of people who are heard off-camera but not shown in the video (probably most commonly Sarah Urist Green) be credited?

Here's my take on all the various topics in this thread...

• I agree with stephenwade regarding auto-adding credits to videos. I mass-populated John and Hank credits by searching their descriptions for "In which Hank" and "In which John," so if there are obvious identifiers like that, I could have it look at some rules to automatically add credits.
• I think we should stick to the people physically appearing in an episode. I'm not sure what the cut-off for "physically appearing" should be, though (in re: non sequitur's question). Right now my thinking is just that, if they're in the video at all (seen or heard), they can be credited.
• Yeah, I was debating what to call the feature. "Appearances" felt a littie awkward, and wouldn't work well if we started credit someone like a musician (e.g. a video with Laurena Segura or Meghan Tonjes's music in it). But I agree that "credits" sounds like it should include behind-the-scenes people. I think "credits" is fine considering the list of people who can be credited is admin-controlled, so we can keep that list fairly short. That is, hopefully the list of creditable people will define the feature better than the name of the feature, if that makes sense.
• Adding/removing credits and Adding/updating images should (as of this posting) be logged now. I still need to code it into the Recent Changes and User pages to make them visible, though. This wasn't done intentionally, per se, it was more of a "this isn't as important, so I want to get the feature out there before coding the logging" situation.

On default credits: Yes, I was only talking about categories (or channels) where one person is certainly in every video. Perhaps the credits may be incomplete (as other people show up in some videos), but never wrong; people could add more credits when they actually watch the video and find the other people are also involved.

Thinking more about this, we might be able to do a rule-based default crediting. If we were to add Default Credits, these are the ones I can think of:

• Any Sexplanations video: Lindsey Doe
• Any Brain Scoop video: Emily Graslie
• Any Healthcare Triage video: Aaron Carroll
• Any video with "in which [John/Hank]" in the description, John/Hank
• Any Crash Course video with the subject in the title, whoever hosts that subject

If we do this, I want to add something to the admin area so the rules can be easily added/deleted. This'll all take some time to develop, though.

A few more things -

• The new categories I made are essentially live shows, but show up on the front page.
• More time problems
• Video #12's title shows up strangely at the category page

I responded to a few of these points in new threads, but let's make sure everything got covered.

1. I briefly looked into the Emma navigation issue. I think it has something to do with the fact that they're technically on two different channels, but I don't know for sure.
2. Fixed.
3. Yeah, deactivating is effectively banning a user. I've added a "clear schedule" link so admins can unassign all users from a specific schedule.
4. Maybe; it's something to think about. Although I'd want to add a user preference so people can opt-in to this, instead of sending to anyone who gave their email on signup.
5. I just wrote up a list. I don't know where to put it yet, but it'll go somewhere.
6. Done.
7. Done.
8. Yes, though I need to work on the style of that page. There might not be enough room for that column, let alone any columns we want to add in the future, so I want to find a more permanent solution to that issue before adding duration.
9. Yep. No idea where that post is at the moment (might be archived), but I can get a similar message up somewhere.
10. Categories containing "project for" are now excluded from the front page.

4. I know it's better to not send emails they didn't explicitly agree to... but maybe just one email? Perhaps like a "Happy New Year!" email to remind them that this site exists, since most users, I imagine, haven't been here since September. This email would mention site improvements from the last few months, and also, perhaps, said the first monthly goal (with the option to opt into to future ones). What do you think?

I'll start considering this, but I want to make some preparations first. There's still a lot of user-based functionality that's missing or broken that I need to deal with. I think we lost some potential volunteers because more was broken at the time of the last surge than I'd realized.

The first two things I need to take care of (related to this) are:

1. The lack of a reset password form. I assume a lot of users will need to be reminded of their usernames or have their passwords reset since they haven't been here for so long.
2. I should add a user preference for "receive emails from site admins" or something.

For what it's worth, there are 246 users with their email address on their account.

There's a lot of duplication on the wiki. That's something I need to work on, as right now it just makes the wiki kind of messy.