Roolz: embedding videos in comments

October 30, 2012 • 6:00 am

I’ve asked readers to avoid embedding videos in their comments (which happens simply when you paste in the URL from YouTube), as it eats up bandwidth and makes the comments section unwieldy.  My impression is that readers do this inadvertently, thinking that only a link and not the whole video will appear.

If you have a video you want to highlight, could you please just remove the “http” part of the URL?  It’s easily restored by readers who want to see the video.

kthxbye

19 thoughts on “Roolz: embedding videos in comments

  1. ^^Not sure why the above comment logged as a new user. Please remove. And apologies — won’t be posting videos with http from here on out.

      1. No no – just what I go by online. I very much admire the late A. Leopold’s work. Ecology written by someone who could have been a poet. “A Sand County Almanac” is one of my favorite books.

    1. Okay, I didn’t know that, but I’d still prefer to keep most videos out of comments as they are messy and take up a lot of space.

      Just put in the link without the http. If you think something is SO special that it has to be seen directly, you can embed the whole video, but please be very judicious about this.

      1. He’s right Jerry, embedded videos do not use any bandwidth from the WEIT servers, only YouTube servers. I’m not saying you should or should not care about embedded videos in comments, but technically, there is no bandwidth issue.

        1. They also only consume readers’s bandwidth when the play button is clicked.

          (Or for those who have browsers set up to pre-fetch videos so they load quicker, but people who do that don’t care about bandwidth.)

          b&

  2. I was indeed surprised when my link became a full blown video player in the comments. I figured this was a feature set by our humble administrator. Can’t this be turned off?

    Regardless, I will abide by this ‘rool’.

  3. If you don’t want videos embedded you need to turn off the auto embed feature feature.

    Right now your comments are set to take a youtube URL and automatically convert it to an embed. It isn’t your users fault but the fault of your comment system’s settings.

    And, as others have noted, embedded is different from hosted. An embed, whether a photo or video, leaves the image or movie on the original site and lets is play through yours. All the bandwidth is directly to the hosting site, not WEIT.

    1. I agree. I have found lots of interesting videos via the comments. If Jerry can make the necessary adjustment so that they are links only, that seems like the easiest solution.

  4. Jerry is stubborn. Your logical reasoning will have no effect. 🙂

    In the meantime, I promise never to embed a video in the comments of WEIT until given permission.

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