As anyone who follows this site will notice, many of the article subjects on this site are videos that are usually, if not pretty much always hosted on YouTube. This isn’t normally a problem, and the worst I’ve had before is maybe a one-off video being deleted, or something that isn’t allowed to be embedded (which you can still click the link and watch so it’s no big deal) but today I discovered something rather annoying:
The user who had uploaded all of the Game Player’s gametapes had closed their YouTube account! This meant all the videos were gone from the articles! Makes the articles rather pointless, doesn’t it?
Now, this isn’t TOO bad – another account, one that very damn well may be the same user, has uploaded most of the video’s, but this still shows a fragile element to using content that isn’t self-hosted in some way – if the sites go down, or the user who has ownership of the media closes their account, and you’re linking to it, well, away it goes.
Of course, it’s logistically impossible for Xadara to actually store all this content, for reasons I shouldn’t even have to explain – hell, I’m in the process right now of making use of a secondary source to host images, as to not clog up the website itself with single-use files.
It’s a double edged sword, really, and is a rather annoying thing that only in this case has truly become an issue for me – one or two of the video’s still haven’t been uploaded at all, so I may not ever be able to complete the video set like I intended to. It’s a damned annoyance, at the very least, but in this case the user closed the account themselves – other times, it’s issues with copyright and YouTube policy that causes the eventual loss of a channel and all the videos on it.
Following the publishing of this little update, I’ll go about fixing the articles to either address the missing video’s or to update them with the “new” upload. If this kind of thing happens again, I might make a “stealth” YouTube channel to upload that content to, but I would hate to take away from the original uploaders in such a way, but if it keeps the content archived and available for commentary here on Xadara, then perhaps it’s for the better.
Let’s hope in any case this doesn’t happen too much more often…
This is why, when I make blog entries for the wrestling blog, the only sources I use for the YouTube videos are WWE’s official YouTube, Impact Wrestling’s official YouTube and El Rey Network’s official YouTube for Lucha Underground. I’ve made over 2000 blog entries for that thing, and I don’t feel like keeping up with what is and is not available on every single one of them.
Sometimes, though, sadly, official channels aren’t an option – even then, they can and will take down videos at times – there is now a “missing” video in my Xbox One S article, because Microsoft took it down! It’s a damned mess but yeah, at least official channels are LESS likely to take stuff down, unless some other issue happens, of course…