[Wikimedia-l] Use of YouTube videos in fundraising banners

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

Victor Grigas, 17/07/2013 07:09:
>  I was expecting to see this thread start the
> moment that the banners went live, because I think it is something that the
> community should concern itself with. [...]

The fundraising team is very careful about making banners that the 
editors don't notice. Trying to check how the banners are doing is like 
playing hide and seek, and only a true masochist would do so given how 
invasive they are. It's better to try and forget they exist.

Moreover, (technical implementations of) videos are really the least of 
concerns about banners the community may have. The inclusion of videos 
in banners (hopefully not auto-playing, but who knows) is something 
quite hateful; let's hope that the thumbnails will be small enough and 
that the additional invasiveness of videos will be compensated by a 
reduction in size of banners so that they take less than 90 % of the screen.

Ryan Lane, 17/07/2013 08:33:
 > Threads indicate that we had enough bandwidth and ops was interested in
 > seeing the load associated with this. I thought we had some issues with
 > varnish or squid, but searching my email indicates that we had video 
issues
 > when moving upload.wm.o to varnish (which was much later). At the time in
 > question we likely would have been able to handle the load. [...]

Let's remember that the day is not far when Gertie the dinosaur brought 
the servers down: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gertie_On_Tour.ogg
The issue was that the single hard disk where the file was stored had to 
serve it to every single viewer and one article where it was included 
received (IIRC) millions of views from a doodle.
That said, I don't know if the fundraising videos were before or after 
the new cache system, and I agree that most of the technical concerns 
are now obsoleted by recent improvements (yay!). The issue should be 
reassessed.

Nemo