Melinda teaches high school in the Bay Area and recently reached out to us with a problem. Her students just finished a video history project that she wanted to share with their parents and classmates. But she was concerned about posting the videos publicly because she didn’t want the whole world to find them (frankly, neither did her students). Melinda told us YouTube’s private sharing options — a 25-person cap that’s limited to other YouTube users — didn’t work for her. She needed a better option to privately share her students’ talent.

Later today, we’ll be rolling out a new choice that will help Melinda and other people like her: unlisted videos.

On this day, 12 years ago, YouTube introduced unlisted videos as a compromise between a public and a private video. Perfect for sharing your history project with friends, video outtakes, or just about anything you didn’t want cluttering your channel.

Some time later, a non-targetted exploit was discovered which could reveal the links of existing YouTube videos, but not the content itself. So in 2017, YouTube changed how links were generated to make links more unpredictable. It could have ended there, but it didn’t.

Years later in 2021, YouTube decided that having their links be hypothetically predictable, might be problematic for old unlisted videos. So they decided to haphazardly automatically private old unlisted videos, uploaded prior to 2017.

Users were offered an option to opt-out, if their channels were still active AND they acted within a month of the announcement. Unfortunately millions of videos were lost in the name of security. Vlogs, school projects, outtakes, patreon videos; things people wanted to share BUT they didn’t private.

Is there any silver lining to all of this? Not all is lost. There are collections like filmot which offer a non-invasive database of metadata on these unlisted videos, minus the videos themselves. There was also a project by Archive Team to archive a few TBs of unlisted videos, even if only a small sample. More than anything, YouTubers have been uploading re-uploads, in the case of inactive channels and/or significant unlisted videos.

Not to sound like a beggar, but we would really appreciate it if you could share this short blog post. Almost one year later this situation has still not become common knowledge. Also be sure to check out our unlisted video countdown from last year:

Index

• What are Community Posts?
• What are Channel Discussions?
• Why is YouTube removing Discussions?
• Which channels have Channel Discussions?
• Does my channel have a Discussion tab?
• Conclusion

Community Posts? What are those?

YouTube’s Community Posts were introduced in 2017, as a way for channels to interact with their viewers and fans. These are typically short texts, images, GIFs or polls; you might think of them as Tweets native to YouTube. They appear both on the channel itself, under the so-called Community Tab, and also in the recommendations on the YouTube Homepage and the Subscriptions Feed. Initially, Community Postswere available only to a number of big channels, such as grav3yardgirl and Vidya Vox.

After some initial success, the feature gradually became available to more channels, albeit not all, circa 2019. You can learn more about how it works on YouTube’s Creator Academy. Earlier this year, The Spiffing Brit made a video which brought a lot of attention to Community Posts, with some exaggerations, pointing out that they were especially prominent on the mobile-view and they could be used to amass a lot of subscribers very quickly.

What is new this October, is that Community Posts will be rolling out to all channels above 500 subscribers, beginning on October 12, 2021. Still not all channels, though we are getting there. Then what is the catch? This update will also remove the old discussion tab which was, formerly, available to all channels.

There’s a Discussion Tab? I have never seen it before?

YouTube first introduced comments on videos sometime in the Summer of 2005. Comments were immediately a hit, but there was a problem; people were not just commenting about the videos themselves, they were sometimes asking the uploader general questions. Unfortunately, channels had to divide their attention between all of their uploads to keep up with their commenters. So some time around April of 2006, YouTube introducedChannel Comments, because somebody had had the genius idea of making a channel-wide comment section. It took the form of a long comment thread appearing at the bottom of channel profiles.

Now these Channel Comments have almost been around since YouTube started, but today they are known as Channel Discussions and have their own, specialised Discussion Tab. Even at this very moment, if you look into a channel’s Discussion, you might catch a glimpse of comments from over a decade ago carrying on memories long forgotten!

Sadly, like many legacy features on YouTube, Discussions were never fully implemented on the mobile apps and they still remain out of view even today. If you mostly browse YouTube on the app, it is very likely that you have never seen any Discussion before.

Why is YouTube removing Discussions? Can’t they co-exist with Community Posts?

In a sense, Discussions were the predecessor to Community Posts. Yet they certainly have not received the same care and attention in recent years, with Discussions still showing hints of the Google+ transition attempted a few years ago. In short, Discussions have been obsoleted.

Unlike Community Posts which were engineered specifically to take advantage of the UI of the mobile app, Discussions remained largely a desktop-only feature. In a mobile-user dominated web, YouTube finds itself with a significant share of mobile users. There are contradictory reports on whether or not YouTube has more mobile or desktop users, with Statista reporting a ~20%-80% global share for mobile vs. desktop users in early 2021 and Comscore reporting a ~70-30% split in the US/UK in 2017. Still, YouTube has made it clear that they are designing with a mobile-first mindset. They have set a track record in removing features missing from mobile, such as video annotations in 2019, and the community contributions editor in 2020. Thus it comes as no surprise that Discussions should come next.

It is also safe to assume that the incredibly slow roll-out of the Community Posts feature to all channels is entirely deliberate. Channel Discussions had a few kinks which needed hammering out, such as often being a frequent target for spam comments. In case you have not noticed, Community Posts are oriented in such a way that they emphasize the channel itself, over commenters. Spam comments are often hidden a screen or two behind the Community Posts themselves, which are mostly kept clean at the channel’s own discretion. They are easier to moderate for channels, and more readable for commenters; that’s a win-win from YouTube’s perspective.

Could YouTube have fixed the way Discussions were organised? Probably, given that they have preserved the channel comments from 15 years ago, through countless layout changes to channels. Yet it seems that YouTube is determined to remove the feature, no matter what.

If you don’t yet have access to Community posts you can use Comments on your videos to engage your viewers.

Team YouTube on the Google Support Page, having seemingly forgotten the original reason channel comments were added in the first place.

InterestinglyDiscussionswere once available on the mobile version of the YouTube website, but even those have been removed, some time earlier this year. If that was not self-sabotage, it certainly was a sign that the design team had been tasked with removing Discussions for good.

From a practical standpoint, it does make sense for YouTube to remove Discussions now with Community Posts as an adequate replacement. Yet the answer to why YouTube would break a years’ long tradition of preserving these ancient comments, is anyone’s guess.

Which channels have a discussion tab?

Even channels started as recently as September 2021 have had Discussions at some point. That sentence is in the present perfect, because many channels which used to have a Discussion section no longer have it:

• Big Channels such as Vsauce, or eddsworld who have already switched to Community Posts have their Discussion history hidden. Not deleted, hidden. There is at least a 30-day rule which allows commenters to view, edit or delete comments they have made on the Discussion page of a channel who has recently switched to Community Posts, from their Google Account’s My Activity Section.

• At some point, the switch to Community Posts was mandated to channels above a certain subscriber count. The current requirement applies to channels strictly above 1000 subscribers. This update to Community Posts is forced even if the channel has been inactive for years, such as in the case of Fred or, more tragically, geriatric1927 or KKD1247.

Do I have a discussion tab?

• If it exists, your channel’s Discussion page will be located at https://www.youtube.com/channel/{CHANNEL ID GOES HERE}/discussion or https://www.youtube.com/user/{USER ID GOES HERE}/discussion.
• Following COPPA compliance changes introduced in 2020, channels which have declared their content to be “Made for Kids”, have all comments disabled across their channel. This includes Discussions. Luckily, past comments are not deleted. Switching the channel out of the “Made for Kids” option will restore all hidden comments intact.
• The road to October 12, will see any other old channels which go over 1000 subscribers lose their Discussion tab as well. That means anyone who passes 1000 subscribers, get the update early! Global removal will begin right after October 12, and community tabs will roll out to channels above 500 subs within an estimated time of a week. Anyone with less than 500 subscribers, will no longer have a Discussion tab and nor will they receive a Communitytab replacement. Please note once more, that the 30-day rule allows commenters to view, edit or delete comments they have made on the Discussion page of a channel who has recently switched to Community Posts.

Concluding Remarks

While Community Posts present an overall upgrade to the YouTube user experience, especially for mobile users, the removal of Channel Discussions is yet another dent to the internet’s short memory span. Seeing people who you would have never thought to have ever talked to each other commenting on one another’s Discussions, is in a sense like scrolling through the threads of an ancient forum. Ironically, the Community Posts still lack this sense of community, instead emphasising a dichotomy between channels and viewers.

Relevant to archivists and data hoarders, a non-API endpoint for Discussions is unknown at this time. Furthermore, given the mandated update having already hidden the Discussions for many channels, options are severely limited. Existing archives besides WayBack Machine snapshots remain undiscovered. Perhaps the interconnectivity of the Discussions between older channels might prove to be useful in crawling out other channels which still have a Discussion tab. One thing is for certain: this will go down as a very unusual moment in YouTube’s history…

On a final, albeit related note, YouTube’s video attributions which were expected to be removed in September, went offline yesterday on September 20. One of the last captures of the attributions endpoint, was taken at 5:19 (GMT) Sep 20, and reported to have shut down by 20:25.

Video attribution pages were intended to list which videos were used to make the current video. This created a network of videos, connecting remixes/compilations/shorter versions of videos with their original source videos. These pages also helped ensure that credit was given to the original authors of video clips, even if the original uploader might have forgotten to do so.

Until some point between 2017 and 2019, video attribution pages also listed the videos that used the current video. The attributions were automatically associated with a video when someone used the online YouTube video editor to add a Creative Commons-licensed clip to their video. If a video had attributions, a link to its attributions page would automatically be placed below its description. On the mobile YouTube app, this link would open the attributions page in the user’s web browser, but more recently all of the attributions links in the mobile app would open the channel that claimed the “Attribution” custom URL.

The video attributions page is one of the oldest pages on YouTube, and is believed to be the last page on YouTube that still uses the old, pre-polymer layout. In fact, the HTML content of the attribution web pages (excluding headers, footers, and video thumbnail overlays) has not been modified since 2011!

No formal archival efforts have been initiated as of this time, but it is anticipated that one will start soon.

The Cinemateca Brasileira was ravaged by a fire last Thursday, on June 27. A core institution for preserving Brazillian cinematography, the Cinemateca was estimated to house over 2000 films and 4 tons of documents in its archives. Artists and conservationists had expressed their concerns on the frailty of the material housed in the Cinemateca, as early as April of this year, noting for instance, the risk of self-combustion of cellulose nitrate films.

According to the local fire brigade, the fire began after maintenance on the air-conditioning system. After assessing the damage, Fire captain Karina Paula Moreira announced -regrettably- that “we will only know for certain after the experts (i.e. forensics), but, probably, nothing was preserved”. A grim end, to remind us all how media preservation is NOT a thing postponable.

New Projects

YouTube finally privated pre-2017 unlisted videos last week, after a delay of a few days. But that wasn’t the end of the story, we still have a few archiving projects and tools to talk about.

Our good friend Jopik has made a TamperMonkey script for revealing the original name and uploader of privated videos in your playlists, not unlike a certain other project from a few months ago.

Jopik was also behind the filmot collection) and that’s actually where the info is being fed in from. You can install the filmot Title Restorer script from here.

Another WIP project is rebane2001’s playlist restorer which will also be able to grab thumbnails and even the videos themselves, if available. Unfortunately, this tool is undownloadable at this time so we will have to settle for the Reddit trailer for now.

Updates

Speaking of YouTube’s unlisted videos, Archive Team’s grabs have landed in the ArchiveTeam Inbox collection on the Internet Archive. In case you are out of the loop, Archive Team grabbed 200 TiB of data on 5,739,754 videos! Titles, comments and low-resolution copies of the original videos!

Last year, when Yahoo Groups shut down archivists pooled together data on different groups and published them on the Internet Archive. Now, the Save Yahoo Groups! project is looking for help in identifying fan groups.

TV Shows, literature, games… If you have had any history on Yahoo Groups prior to its shut-down, or consider yourself a fandom enthusiast, we implore you to head over to the SYG Discord Server or their fandom identification spreadsheet.

The latest version of MAME (0.234), the arcade machine emulator, focuses on 3D arcade games. You are in luck if you were in the mood for some GTI Club! Read more about it on MAME’s blog!

YouTube is a platform and a community which live off of reuploads. One might even go so far as to say that reuploads have been a key to YouTube’s success and reuploads themselves have been a product of YouTube. With recent events in mind, now is a good time as ever to re-examine the mutually beneficial relationship between YouTube and the practice of reuploading.

In 2005, YouTube started off as a small video-sharing site. At the time few people would have been able to predict that it would grow to be the 2nd most popular site on the web and yet here we are! One factor Co-founder Jawed Karim attributes their success to is timeliness. In particular, he thinks YouTube came at a time when clip sharing became very common. To quote from a talk he gave in 2006:

The “clip culture” you see now is basically this demand that you can find any video at any time and you can share it with other people, or you can share your own videos with other people. […]

There were a couple of events in 2004 that kind of fueled this. One was this [wardrobe malfunction]. So this, of course, happened on television, but it only happened once and never again. And so for anyone who wanted to see it after that, well they had to find it online. The other big event I remember is this [Stewart on Crossfire] interview. And you know this was also shown on television once and not after that. Everyone was talking about it, but people who missed it really wanted to be in on the joke so they would try to find it online…

Jawed Karim, r | p 2006: YouTube: From Concept to Hypergrowth (25:15)

YouTube was able to meet this clip demand, acting as a universal replay button for any clip people could imagine. It’s no coincidence that obscure/lost media fanatics were flocking to the site not soon after its launch. From Sesame Street shorts to TV pilots, old footage quickly piled up! YouTube had an entire subculture of video remixes called YouTube Poops, which were made from recycled clips from old TV shows and games.

Alas this clip culture was both the boon and bane of early YouTube. As users uploaded these clips liberally, some of the owners and rights holders of the original source material of said clips came to view this practice as copyright infringement. This tension led to the infamous
Viacom vs. YouTube case in 2007, where media giant Viacom sued YouTube and Google for $1 billion in alleged damages! If you are looking for a good summary, EmpLemon did a video on it a few years ago.

Viacom did not actually win the case, in fact it came to light that they had taken advantage of clip culture for a stealth marketing campaign of their own. But the whole ordeal had lasting effects on YouTube. In an attempt to appease intellectual property owners, YouTube introduced their content ID system, then called video ID, for automatically detecting copyright infringing videos.

(Video Identification ~ YouTube Advertisers. If the above video is unavailable please use this Wayback Snapshot)

All of a sudden, videos on YouTube became a whole lot more volatile. This automated system did not only take down a lot of infringing material, but it also hit false positives, matching short-length clips, remixes and video reviews as well. At one point you would have been lucky to have had a few of your videos deleted, as opposed to having your whole channel terminated for seemingly having one too many copyright strikes. Yet clip culture on YouTube has somehow been able to endure, even beyond this era.

The term reupload probably first entered the YouTube lexicon when users began uploading new, higher quality versions of videos on their channel as YouTube kept introducing higher caps to video quality. These YouTube upgrades came around the same time as Content ID, so you will find cases where the reupload of a video has survived but the original has been deleted.

It wasn’t just the video makers themselves who were reuploading though, soon other users also began reuploading downloaded copies they had made of their favorite YouTube videos. This was not merely due to fans appreciating content from their fellow YouTubers, but also due to the fact that the frequent channel terminations could deny the original uploader the right to reupload their channel’s videos in the first place.

Ironically, the term reupload soon was associated with degredation in quality as people began reuploading videos over and over again. There’s even a Gizmodo article about it from 2010. There have also been people who have complained about their work being reuploaded without permission or credit, worse yet plagiarised. Clearly, reuploads are a great power that came with great responsibility. Still, many diligent channels are dedicated to preserving the memory of original content through its reuploads.

The fear of such memories being lost through mass-deletions looms over YouTube, even today. Early ContentID was certainly not the last disaster to plague YouTube videos. Hacker pranks, copyright trolls, the Adpocalypse and Elsagate controversies have all taken their toll on many unfortunate channels. Today, we once more find ourselves on the brink of a scene similar to a mass-deletion, with the mass-privating of unlisted videos uploaded prior to 2017.

A few years ago it was discovered that YouTube video IDs were being generated according to a certain pattern and it was thus theoretically possible to predict video links. This presented a problem for unlisted videos, which were meant to be videos that were to be shared by link only.

Unlisted videos are a tricky subject; on one hand, a video might be unlisted, rather than privated, to make it easier to share with friends. On the other hand, many YouTubers also unlist videos such as outtakes, early revisions of videos, stream archives or off-topic content that might not fit their channel’s niche. Such videos are linked to, in video descriptions, pinned comments or Tweets. So while some unlisted videos aren’t meant for everyone’s eyes, other unlisted videos are only hidden from the channel interface and search results. Yet an exploit is an exploit, and URL predictability could be a serious problem for certain videos.

Some action certainly had to be taken here, so in 2017 the video ID formula was changed into something less predictable, that was definitely a step in the right direction. What is happening today, 4 and a half years after, is a security update to set a sizable number of unlisted videos uploaded prior to that date to private. Thus, several million videos have suddenly been virtually deleted, as they are no longer accessible to anyone but the channel owner. While this decision will secure potentially private content for many channels, it is also a great loss for inactive channels who unlisted videos liberally and were not able to opt-out of the decision.

On the bright side, channels which are still active can set their videos to public at a later date. In fact, YouTube goes so far as to encourage these channels to re-upload their own videos to be able to take advantage of the new URL system. Except, it’s just not the original uploaders and video makers who are reuploading. Reuploads from other users who had previously downloaded unlisted videos are starting to also pop up, the same as it ever was.

With tools like youtube-dl or Reddit’s SaveVideo, the YouTube community is pulling together to salvage whatever they can from old unlisted videos. And they are getting only better, Archive Team’s unlisted video project hit over 200TB of data. As videos die off, here are some folks desperately trying to revive them, trying to uphold what one might call their online heritage.

A few days ago one of the oldest videos on YouTube was made public from unlisted. It was originally uploaded on April 29, 2005. Titled Premature Baldness, it too is a reupload and final memento from a chasebrown.com which is no longer recognizable. A whisper to remind us that while invoking the right to be forgotten we ought not to neglect, on the other hand, a right to be remembered…

Fortunately, Archive Team has started a project to back up the metadata and 360p resolution video files for as many of these items as possible, and contributing is really easy! In addition to the videos themselves, data to be archived by this project includes the video watch page (including titles, descriptions, uploader channel, etc.), captions, comments, attributions, and thumbnails. The data archived by this project will be made available in WARC format on the Internet Archive and through the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.

To help out with this project, simply follow the steps to download and run an Archive Team Warrior, and then select the YouTube project. (You can also run the project using a Docker container using atdr.meo.ws/archiveteam/youtube-grab as the image address.)

Additionally, people with lists of unlisted video IDs/URLs and unlisted playlist IDs/URLs are encouraged to share them so they can be archived.

In order to stay up-to-date with the project and be reachable in case of an issue, project contributors are encouraged to connect and stay connected to the project discussion channel, #down-the-tube on irc.hackint.org, also available through webchat.

Archiving progress statistics for this project are available on the Archive Team project tracker, and source code is available on GitHub.

After older unlisted videos are made private on July 23, this project will shift to archiving the metadata for as many YouTube videos as possible, though not the actual video files themselves in most cases due to the amount of storage video takes and limited resources of the Internet Archive.

Inactive accounts policy
In general, users are expected to be active members within the YouTube community. If an account is found to be overly inactive, the account may be reclaimed by YouTube without notice. Inactivity may be considered as:
- Not logging into the site for at least six months
- Never having uploaded video content
- Not actively partaking in watching or commenting on videos or channels

This policy is not new. Much of the text of this policy actually dates back to at least June 17, 2009, when the policy was originally introduced as part of YouTube’s username policy for username squatting. At the time, the policy was designed to prevent inactive users from holding valuable usernames or usernames that match brand names. This is because, from YouTube’s launch in 2005 until March 2012, every YouTube channel had to choose a unique username that would form its permanent /user/ URL. Additionally, from 2012 until November 2014, all channels could optionally sign up with or create a permanent username without having to meet any eligibility requirements. Because usernames were in such high demand, the original policy stated that the usernames of reclaimed accounts may be “made available for registration by another party” and that “YouTube may release usernames in cases of a valid trademark complaint”, though the former passage was removed by October 9, 2010.

Since November 24, 2014, YouTube’s username system has been replaced by a custom URL system with minimum eligibility requirements that are more difficult to meet using inactive accounts or accounts created just for squatting usernames. As of July 2021, accounts need to be at least 30 days old, have at least 100 subscribers, and have uploaded a custom profile picture and banner in order to claim a custom URL. Additionally, with the new system, YouTube is able to “change, reclaim, or remove” these custom URLs without otherwise affecting the associated channel. As such, the Username Squatting Policy was no longer necessary for its original purpose.

At some time between February 2013 and March 2014, the Username Squatting Policy was renamed to the “Inactive accounts policy” and the sentence about releasing trademarked usernames was removed. As of July 2021, the policy has not been revised since then. It also appears that the policy has fallen into disuse: in March 2021, a Reddit user posted “As a trusted flagger I can tell you that YouTube hasn’t used that policy in years.”

Additionally, at some point between September 2014 and March 2015, YouTube created a new support article which stated that “Once a username was taken by a channel it could never be used again, even if the original channel was inactive or deleted”, which directly contradicts the purpose of the original Username Squatting Policy.

Some archivists fear that the large amounts of video data being stored from inactive accounts may be lost if YouTube decides to delete those accounts. However, it appears that YouTube has found a way to help offset some of the cost of storing these videos. On November 18, 2020, YouTube announced that they would enable advertisements on videos posted by channels that are not members of the YouTube Partner Program. While no explanation was given for this change, it was announced during the same 3 months in which Google announced several major changes that would reduce the amount of storage being used across the company’s products [1] [2], so it can be inferred that this policy change was made for the same reason.

So, why does the policy still exist? One possible reason is that the policy is simply forgotten. YouTube’s support site is large and contains many articles, and many of them have outdated passages and describe discontinued features that were removed long ago [1] [2] [3] [4]. Many pages also contain references to the old version of YouTube, which has been inaccessible to the public since December 2020 [1] [2] [3]. Also, as of 2021, the text of the Inactive Accounts Policy hasn’t been updated for at least 7 years, though the surrounding page was updated in September 2020 to remove the policy on vulgar language, which had been given its own page. So, YouTube could have simply forgotten that the Inactive Accounts Policy exists, and the people responsible for updating the support pages could have just left the policy because they weren’t specifically instructed to remove it.

Another possible reason the policy still exists is that, while unlikely, YouTube could be preserving the policy for possible use in the future. However, YouTube would provide advance warning to users, likely via email and updated support articles, before enacting this policy, and since we have seen none of those shared online, we have no reason to believe this policy is being enacted at the current time.

So, while YouTube has an Inactive Accounts Policy, it hasn’t used it in years because URLs on the service can now be changed and removed without deleting and recreating accounts, and it appears it has found a way to help offset some of the cost of storing the videos uploaded by these channels. At this time, users and archivists shouldn’t worry about this policy, but should instead focus on specific content removal announcements such as annotations, liked videos lists, draft community contribution closed captions and metadata, playlist notes as well as older unlisted videos.

Shutdowns

Webs, the once popular website host, was expected to shut down after 20 years, at the end of June. Fortunately, Archive Team is on the case, and double fortunately it seems that sites are still up, even today on 5 July. Archive stats available here.

Microsoft’s Codeplex archive was expected to shut down some time in July. I am happy to report that Codeplex has already been fully scanned and Archive Team’s collection is available here.

Unlisted YouTube Video Scramble

With 18 days to go before YouTube forcibly privates old unlisted videos and playlists on July 23 many archiving projects are being run concurrently.

There has been much activity on certain subreddits for sniffing out links to unlisted videos. These include r/speedrun and speedrun.com collecting unlisted speedruns, r/nerdfighters backing up unlisted Vlogbrothers content, r/homestuck chasing after fan videos, besides the usual suspects from r/datahoarder.

Our fellow archivist Jopik, recently published his own unlisted video collection on filmot.com. Privately collected from various corners of the internet over the past 2-3 years, this collection contains links and metadata on several million unlisted YouTube videos. Members of Flashpoint and The Eye have taken note of the collection and have began archiving video files of interest.

Finally Archive Team is working on a major project for collecting metadata for unlisted video links on hackint#down-the-tube and a minor project for saving notable videos on hackint#youtubearchive. Some of Archive Team’s unlisted videos are being provided by Sponsorblock which continues to ask users to submit unlisted video URLs.

Forthcoming projects include Omniarchive‘s rush to grab unlisted Minecraft footage and the Distributed YouTube Archive prioritizing a queue of unlisted videos…

Other Updates

The popular modding community Nexus Mods has taken a decision to make permanent archives of all mods hosted on their site. While the decision has been celebrated by web preservationists the world over, it has also drawn ire from some modders who are upset that they have lost the freedom to delete their mods, as reported by Kotaku.

This change is intended to lay the groundwork for Nexus’ upcoming collections system, which will allow modders to combine different mods for the same game. Obviously, if the dependencies of a collection were deleted the entire collection could break, left-pad style. Community manager BigBizkit made it clear that as part of Nexus’ “noble” mission to make modding easier, it was essential that modders be able to build upon previous work.

Let me stress that even without collections in the picture, file deletions and disappearing data constitute a problem and create a development environment that cannot serve as a strong foundation for the future of our platform. 

BigBizkit, An important notice and our future plans for collections

As a compromise for those not fond of the change, modders have a month-long grace period to delete any files/mods that they do not want indefinitely preserved.

Yahoo! Answers might have shut down a couple of months ago, but a substantial portion of a former hallmark of the web was saved. Unfortunately said massive collection is not very human-readable. There are talks on hackint#yahooanswersgraveyard to build a “Yahoo! Answers Archive” search engine akin to the YouTube Community Contributions search tool. Get hyped and stay tuned!

Discoveries

Hit Save! and the e-Reader shared a number of discoveries over the past few weeks. Notably, they managed to acquire a rare 2002 Battle Road trophy card and play it on an e-Reader.

You ask what is a Battle Road trophy card? These “trophies” were awarded at official Pokémon TCG tournaments held across Japan. These cards came in several flavors, with a male/female trainer, with different pokémon in background and even what the winner had placed in the tournament they had earned the card.

Though serving no gameplay effect in the card game, these cards were readable by Nintendo’s now-defunct e-Reader GBA extension. Card Capto- (ahem) Collector Qwachansey was kind enough to send a card he had acquired to the folks at Hit Save, and now for the first time ever you can see the funny little message you got for scanning these trophy cards.

The full blog post has a lot of other interesting details on how the team built a modified e-Reader to be able to capture footage, as well as some other interesting cards they have come into possession of recently. Read about the The Ren-e-ssance for yourself here!

Long time SNES manual preservationist, author and contributor to numerous emulation projects and friend to many game preservationists Near/Byuu has passed away on June 27, 2021.

Earlier that day, they had sent out a series of Tweets to the effect of a suicide letter. Wishing to remain anonymous, the last person to have talked to Near prior to their death would soon contact Hector Martin “marcan”, believing them to have taken their own life while on the phone. Several hours later the event was confirmed by local police.

This tragic turn of events had followed episodes of harassment, which Near detailed in their final words. Their parting request was that they be remembered for their many contributions to the community, and not for they were about to undertake.

Shutdowns

Last Wednesday, on June 23, YouTube announced a decision to automatically set all Unlisted Videos uploaded prior to 2017 to private, one month later on July 23. The difference being that; unlisted videos are hidden from search results, but people with the link can access them, whereas private videos are inaccessible to other users unless the uploader gives manual approval.

While channels have the ability to opt-out, to keep their unlisted videos unlisted, and not privated, it has come to the attention of archivists that many inactive channels are unlikely to pick this option given the short timeframe presented.

In the way of archiving projects for unlisted videos, there has already been much discussion and some organization on #down-the-tube on hackint, Hacker News, r/datahoarder and the Distributed YouTube Archive. Alas, there is yet no project in motion, at this time.

The Unlisted Videos website, which was made specifically for the purpose of collecting links to unlisted videos, has been scraped or is being scraped by several groups, worth about half a million videos. There is also Jopik’s searchable collection of 4.5 million unlisted videos, which is a monument in its own right. That being said, these are only links, and the video files themselves have yet not been mirrored. So be sure to stay tuned for upcoming projects.

To spread awareness of the situation, we are doing countdown of unlisted videos on the Data Horde Twitter account.

This upcoming change from YouTube comes with a similar update to Google Drive, which will render many shared files inaccessible to users who have not accessed them prior to a certain date.

Updates

In support of the efforts to archive unlisted videos, Sponsorblock has introduced a new feature to detect, and anonymously submit links to unlisted videos, that users might be watching.

The Flash Player emulator Ruffle, is now a bit easier to install. Ruffle has finally been added as an extension to the Chrome Web Store, and you can run it from the comfort of Chromium browsers.

In other news, the mod community/archive Gamebanana suffered a major outage over the weekend. Thankfully, as it turns out, this hiccup was only the result of a billing glitch on their host’s side. The site is now up and running once more.

Can you believe our host accidentally suspended 16 of our servers due to a billing glitch, and nobody was around to fix it because it’s a Sunday. This is the biggest host blooper we’ve ever encountered in 20 years.

tom, Gamebanana Admin

Discoveries

Members of Omniarchive, a group dedicated to archiving old lost versions of Minecraft, managed to recover the elusive Alpha 1.1.1. version on June 25, 2021. The first of many Seecret updates, Alpha 1.1.1. was notable for being online for only a few hours before the Alpha 1.1.2 hotfix.

Archivist ProffApple found a tweet someone who had just downloaded the update had made over a decade ago on the day that Alpha 1.1.1. came out, September 18, 2010 to be specific. Turns out, they still had the game files lying around!

You can read more about the story on this Kotaku Article by Zack Zwiezen and this PC Gamer article by Jonathan Bolding.

Unlisted videos are videos which are hidden from search results, but can still be shared in links and playlists. These are distinct from Private videos, which are only visible to the channel owner and owner-approved users. Unlisting a video is preferable to privating in cases such as behind the scenes or alternate take videos. You also have prank videos, legacy courses on educational channels; really, unlisting a video has been the go-to option for when people want to continue hosting their old videos instead of deleting them.

Edit 5 July: This change also applies to pre-2017 unlisted playlists, as pointed out on this page, slightly out of view.

In 2017, YouTube changed how links were generated for Unlisted videos. Next month, they are officially retiring older Unlisted videos by privating them, by default. This means that a lot of links on/off of YouTube will break, after all 2005 to 2017 is 12 whole years! But don’t despair, just yet. If you, as an uploader, have old Unlisted videos on your channel you have a few other options:

• Make your Unlisted videos Public.
• Re-upload your Unlisted videos, and again unlist them so you can share their new links.
• Fill out a form to keep your Unlisted videos Unlisted! Be forewarned that it might take up to 24 hours for YouTube to get back to you.

You have one month, until 23 July 2021 to decide which of these options best suits your needs. Note that you can later unlist your automatically privated videos from the YouTube Studio, even if you don’t opt-out, according to this Support Page. 23 July is, however, the deadline for viewers to mirror or download any pre-2017 Unlisted videos they might have access to.

A copy of YouTube’s e-mail can be found below for your reading pleasure. Be sure to stay tuned to Data Horde for upcoming updates on Unlisted videos and related projects!