Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-24264457-20200115174045

Hello everyone, this is an important announcement and I really encourage everyone to read the whole thing before taking any action or asking any questions.

Due to the volatility and lack of stability of gameplay videos, we are indefinitely suspending the file naming guidelines for gameplay videos, extractions, and any non-official video content. After multiple months of observation of the impact of the August 2019 changes, and seeing almost a full decade of content be deleted we can no longer keep up with the demand required and renaming all 2000+ videos. This decision was one that we did not want to make, but one we had to make. We would also like to emphasize that videos are not a priority on this wiki. They never were supposed to be the main idea of the wiki, but I think we've lost sight of that. I'll explain more below.

If you still want to replace videos, please follow the following guidelines:
 * 1) Search the video's YouTube title (note that characters such as : (colon), | (pipe),  (brackets),  –  (curly things), /\ (slashes) are automatically omitted from video titles due to technical restrictions) in the search bar before adding it. The video may already be on the wiki.  If the search turns up a different video with the same title, contact an administrator.
 * 2) When you add the video, make sure just the video title comes up in the code.  If a -0, -1, -2, or any other number is present at the end of the title, remove it and check the preview to make sure it's still the same video and not a glitched image.  If it is, contact an administrator.

I would like to thank the users who are currently following these guidelines already, as well as the users who are trying their best to replace dead videos. However, we just cannot keep up with the demand to rename everything. I would also like to reiterate that videos should not be the main focus of the wiki. Yes, they help. Yes, they're good for people to look at and learn more about the stuff the wiki talks about. These reasons are why we are not deleting them entirely yet. However, I can see needing to do that either because of more dead videos or pressure from Ubisoft sometime before 2022. This is not to say that we want y'all to stop replacing the dead videos, that's still ideal for now but we need to let go of the idyllic paradise where every article has functioning videos that are organized by "song - game". Maybe that last line was just for me, because I'm saddened by all this work going down the drain. Like, almost six years' worth.

I would like to focus our efforts on things more viable in the long-term. Images and descriptions being the two most important. There are some songs in the main series that lack menu screenshots of the game they originated from. While that is understandable if it was a rare DLC or something, there are songs like Love Is All that lacked the section entirely until recently. I'm not saying every gallery has to be on the same level of Dame Tu Cosita, but it would be nice to at least have menu screenshots for everything. Also, descriptions. Some songs lack a description of dancers or the background. Fill those in while there is still footage.

In conclusion, here are the main points of this post.
 * Due to the large amount of files that would need to be renamed and the fact that most would be dead by the time we renamed them all we are abandoning the file naming guidelines for gameplay videos.
 * The file naming guidelines still apply to official media (previews, behind the scenes, etc., basically anything posted by Ubisoft)
 * The file naming guidelines still apply to images. I didn't mention images here, but I know some of y'all are Olympic gold medalists at jumping to conclusions so I wanted to make that clear.
 * Gameplay videos sections will stay on pages for now, but given how things are going, things may change for the worse in coming years.
 * Gameplay videos that are on pages already should not be removed if they still work, regardless of how they're currently named.

I think that's everything. I want to thank everyone who made it this far. I also want to remind everyone to appreciate just how far we've come as a community. I think the whole videos crisis kinda clouds the fact that we have built so much here beyond videos. Let's focus on the good instead of the bad. 