New Media Library Changes and Rules!

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The media library we have here at 8WAYRUN started with the best of intentions. It was supposed to be a place where users could find high quality and relevant videos to their interests. And at first, that's what it was; it housed tournament videos, skill projects and more...

However, since then, technology has changed. The ability to record and stream video is open to pretty much anyone. Buy a Live Gamer Portable for relatively cheap and you can get started in no time! Because of this, suddenly everyone is producing video and adding it to the media library, instead of just the high profile tournament organizers.

With all this though, we had a problem... Too many videos in the media library meant it was harder for users to find content they were actually interested in. Tournament videos were being pushed down by endless XBL/PSN matches. If that's what you were interested in, then good for you; but I imagine most people don't care about random online matches, or how some unknown player rage-quit after almost getting triple perfected.

So how do we fix this problem? At first, I was thinking about closing the media library for general submission and making it available only for "marquee" videos like tournaments and tutorials. However, people objected to this idea; saying it was elitist. 8WAYRUN was founded to fight against elitism, so they had a point. However, without some sort of elitism, the current problem would remain.

Solution:

So I decided on a compromise. The media library would remain open for general submission; but focus has been shifted away from single video listings, towards playlists. Playlists are a bit different; anyone may create a private or hidden/unlisted playlist; however we will be restricting public playlists to tournaments and important series only. This will make it a bit easier to find "marquee" videos, without restricting general submission.

Other New Features:

If you check the media library as of recently, you will see that playlists have taken a more prominent position on the index page. Since playlists are technically more important than single pieces of media, they are larger and easier to spot than individual media.

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You will also find a series of new sorting options throughout the library. In addition to "recent" and "popular" sorting; there is now a "trending" sort. Trending sorting is similar to popular sorting; except that older items are slowly weeded out.

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Keyword/Character tagging has also changed a bit. In the past, only moderators and the original submitter could tag a video with the characters in that video. Because of this, there are often videos with missing tags, or completely untagged altogether. Now, any user may tag characters to videos using a nice search interface on the sidebar of each video.

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Speaking of keyword changes... In the past, each keyword had it's own page; these were essentially static and never changed. History has shown me that these pages were kind of useless. So now keywords have been rewritten instead to be "search filters". On any video list page, you can now add keywords as search filters to limit results. In addition, you can add multiple keywords to a single search. So now if you wanted to see videos that feature both Talim and Taki, you could do it easily!

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And finally, there is a new link on the navigation bar called "Your Media". This link will take you to a personal viewer for all your media and playlists within the media library. From there you can do batch changes to your media and playlists; as well as add multiple media to a single playlist at once.

Other Notes:

Sometime in the future I will be clearing out the "Tournaments" sub-categories. These sub-categories were put in place before the playlist system was implemented. With the new playlist system, these sub-categories are not needed; and further promote elitism. All media within these sub-categories will be moved into the "Tournaments" category.

A lot of these changes have to do with javascript files. Depending on your browser settings and how heavily they cache javascript files; it may be a few hours/days until you get the new changes (unless you force refresh your cache). Until you receive the new files, these changes may appear broken.
 
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Jason Axelrod

Jason Axelrod

Owner and Operator of 8WAYRUN
I'm going to be blunt and just say that a *booru-style approach would be best for the media section. The ability to browse through all videos in order of latest uploads is egregiously undervalued and narrowing results by tag inclusion/exclusion is far more efficient for finding specific pieces of media than Google-esque searches (specifically because a video about a certain thing could be named any number of different things).
 
@Slade

You can already do all that...

Sort by recent:
http://8wayrun.com/media/medias?sort=recent

Restrict by tags (characters):
http://8wayrun.com/media/talim/keyword

The so called *booru-approach isn't actually a thing. Keyword tagging has been around for years before any *booru site ever existed. *booru sites don't actually do anything different from your basic keyword search; except that it puts the tagged keywords prominently in the sidebar instead of tucking it down under a keyword listing.
 
Apparently I'm retarded and didn't think to click on the Media button in the navigation menu of the Media section in the title bar, which are different things.

Is there an overlap between categories and tag searching? Specifically, is it possible to do something like search for all videos tagged with Aeon excluding any videos in the Online PSN/XBL Matches category?
 
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Apparently I'm retarded and didn't think to click on the Media button in the navigation menu of the Media section in the title bar, which are different things.

Is there an overlap between categories and tag searching? Specifically, is it possible to do something like search for all videos tagged with Aeon excluding any videos in the Online PSN/XBL Matches category?
At the moment no... I'm looking into doing advanced filtering in the future... such as searching for multiple keywords at once.
 
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Personally, I find the new Media library confusing and difficult to use.
- I see little to no difference between 'trending' and 'popular',
- the same videos are sometimes in three different places,
- trending are at the top, but it's the recent ones that should be first in my opinion,
- to me, it lacks 'pages' for recent media. Just like You browse through pages in a thread, would it not be easier to do that to recent media, so that even if someone spams with his vids You can go back and see what was posted before?
- instead of recent / popular / trending would it not be easier to have a division on tournament / casual / CaS ? and in each category only have recent vids with pages to look into older ones?


I know that administrating the site and dealing with users etc is hard and I am glad we have someone like You Jaxel, just wanted to share my concerns.
clean and simple page turning for older vids would do the trick, for me at least.

PS
besides previous and next in playlists, is there a possibility to see a list of all the vids in a playlist?
 
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@TheFool The difference between trending and popular should become evident over time, as older videos get pushed off the trending section.

As Jaxel said earlier, pages for local media is located by clicking on the "media" button in the navigation bar for the media section. A bit of an obfuscation but the functionality is there regardless (and has become my default means of navigating the media).

The new filter feature is amazing and will let you do what you asked for. Great work from Jaxel, now I feel like a dick because of my first post. Makes me feel like I should read into CSS a bit and see if I can contribute something back. No promises though~

Edit:
Screenshot_2013_10_28_08_12_12.png
 
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@TheFool The difference between trending and popular should become evident over time, as older videos get pushed off the trending section.
Actually, while the difference between trending and popular will become clearly evident over time... I imagine the difference between trending and recent to be little. We have a small community here, so more often not, the recent submissions will become trending.

does this mean @Jrasta111 can stop posting his dumb shit?
No, he gets to keep posting his dumb shit. But now you can more easily ignore it all. In addition, since his stuff is stupid, chances are they won't ever become "trending".

Trending/Popular scores are calculated using the following formulas... Comments are worth 100 points, likes are worth 50 points, and views are worth 1 point. Popularity is based on a the flat final value of these conversions. So popularity is how many points it has earned over the entire lifetime of the video.

Trending however divides the popular score based on a scheduled decay time. So if the decay time is 1 day; then for each day old a video is, it will be divided by that number of days. So if a video has a popular score of 1500 points, on day 3, it will only have a trending score of 500 points. A video with a popular score of 1200, that is only 2 days old, will have a trending score of 600 points, and be ranked higher.
 

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