Regarding Future Website Redesign Plans

[CrazyDreamer]

As for the intended functions of the site going forward, if I could just put on my professional hat for a moment . . . *puts on Mad Library and Information Scientist hat*

(1) Catalogs are not outmoded. You cannot have a vibrant community without a discovery layer; even sites such as Facebook, Tumblr, or Twitter use liking/sharing, favoriting/reblogging, and favoriting/retweeting as a community-mediated discovery methods, although they're more instant-message-oriented than media repositories. You may want to create a unified search to increase access to outside resources, of course.*

(2) Hosting is a necessary if we are to avoid losing access to entire sections of our community and art history. There are plenty of reasons that some people don't want to subject their videos to YouTube (e.g., ContentID, advertising) or want to restrict them to a logged-in user community. There are also legacy concerns, because this is the only repository for many AMVs by creators who have left the community, and that number will continue to increase due to natural turnover.

(3) Ratings, reviews, and recommendations are very, very important. This is true to some extent even in the traditional library world (which has some ethical boundaries not of concern here), but it's also a key feature of everything from YouTube to Netflix to Amazon, and for good reasons. Quality/interest filtering helps increase people's RoI for the time spent browsing potentially interesting videos, and automated recommendation is a key discovery method. At a minimum, you may want to increase the social media aspects of the site, especially on the catalog side.**

None of this is to suggest that community/social aspects are not important—the way that they're firewalled at the moment is perhaps too extreme—but I'm not an expert on that outside of how they interact with media repositories/catalogs.

*Unified search might work better with community cataloging of outside resources, although there are many potential problems with that. Delving into that rabbit hole is beyond the scope of this post.

**Opt-in for existing objects (video pages, account pages), opt-out for new objects.

[Farlo]

i remember those days. no matter how you list the community, i think the biggest problem is that its mostly dead. less active members means less potential donations. I like the Idea of utilizing youtube, but their processing screws up quality, especially with older videos. we could always go to http://www.reddit.com/r/amv/ and inform people that the ORG exists, i like to refer people over when they are trying to find videos.

[CrazyDreamer]

People should be able to use YouTube if they want to, and we should enable cataloging, discovery, and viewing of those videos. People should be able to not use YouTube if they don't want to, and we should enable cataloging, discovery, and viewing of those videos.

This is not an either/or.

[Farlo]

People should be able to use YouTube if they want to, and we should enable cataloging, discovery, and viewing of those videos. People should be able to NOT use YouTube if they don't want to, and we should enable cataloging, discovery, and viewing of THOSE videos.

This is not an either/or.

thats what i was getting at, but i'm not so good at getting thoughts out anymore.

[Pwolf]

People should be able to use YouTube if they want to, and we should enable cataloging, discovery, and viewing of those videos. People should be able to NOT use YouTube if they don't want to, and we should enable cataloging, discovery, and viewing of THOSE videos.

This is not an either/or.

thats what i was getting at, but i'm not so good at getting thoughts out anymore.

x2

(cause it has a beard)

[Shin-AMV]

People should be able to use YouTube if they want to, and we should enable cataloging, discovery, and viewing of those videos. People should be able to not use YouTube if they don't want to, and we should enable cataloging, discovery, and viewing of those videos.

This is not an either/or.

x3
I don't think people are actively saying get rid of the catalog, but rather to refine it so it can catalog entries in a way that isn't exclusive to itself and harnessing outside resources rather then push them away (what Pwolf said)

[MimS]

Any sort of redesign at this point requires a complete refocus, as GQ stated. Personally, I'd like to see the catalog and video uploads go away. Focus the site on the forum, contests, and social events. Removing video uploads would remove the need for donations and open more options for the site, as far as where it could go without running into legal trouble (advertising at cons?).

I would hate to see this. Pretty much the only thing this place is useful for (to me) is the catalog and the ability to search for and find videos based on almost any criteria I would want. I still download videos and keep them on my HDD, so I'm probably in the minority as I know most people watch videos via streaming these days, but I love love love that I have unlimited access to over 100,000 individual AMVs that I can search for and find with relative ease, versus trying to find specific videos on YouTube which can be maddening. This website's greatest asset is the fact that there are so many videos on here available for download, a huge portion of which are not available anywhere else. Old videos whose editors have moved on to other things and who never bothered to upload to YouTube can be found on here, and although it may take accidentally stumbling across them to find them at all, the fact that thy're here means that there's some record of them which would be lost if the catalog and uploads were to go away. This, in my opinion, would massively suck.

This.
I, myself, don't really edit anymore but some days ago I even happened to get from here an old vid of mine because it wasn't anywhere else and the same can happen about some vids I used to love in the past that I want to get back.

So, if a complete redesign/rebuild happens, make sure to keep the catalog.
Btw, been a long time since I stopped following how things are going on the org but what I can say for sure is getting a cooler website is a struggle. My experience with AMV-France is that, even with capable people, it won't fall from the sky, a website takes a lot of time before even being made, it requires the whole responsible people to actually know what to put in it and how, it requires many different abilities not provided by a training alone (as good as a web programmer can be, web designer is still needed !) and these said people do this, most of the time, for free during their free time when they can be paid a lot for the same thing in their everyday's life.
Actually, getting a new website for AMV-France became an inside joke, everytime our programmer said "I'm progressing", our reaction was just "rofl". Well, funny thing is we do see some progress atm but it took us years, more than the first time org even mentioned redesign, it required us to actually get more than one person capable AND dedicated to helping the community and these both things together are actually where the problem is.

tl;dr Be patient, blaming on the admins is easy (and more than probably, there are reasons to blame them) but it's not because they're admins that they can make things faster, if the community is concerned for real for the redesign, the capable people will come out from it.

[MimS]

I would like to say again : make the catalog your strong point tbh, I'm not even sure any amv website can provide an "history of AMV" as you can, org was here first (kind of), make editors know about it! Only AMV news has a catalog rivalizing but not from this pov

(For god's sake, I've been on the forum for years and in this sub-form I still can't edit, it's just a stupid thing to keep this option to donators XD)

[Shui]

People should be able to use YouTube if they want to, and we should enable cataloging, discovery, and viewing of those videos. People should be able to not use YouTube if they don't want to, and we should enable cataloging, discovery, and viewing of those videos.

This is not an either/or.

x4 though I'm a download rather than streaming guy - I realize that it's not where it's at right now.

[Diegao]

I agree with CrackTheSky and MimS, I consider the catalog the strong point of the site, and even if nowadays most editors use Mega or sites like that to host their videos, I still use the A-M-V.org catalog. For many reasons, the main one is that I like the idea of having my personal page with all my videos cataloged.
About the redesign, I can't say anything because I don't know the situation, I don't have any capabilities to help and I don't even have money to make a donation at the moment