Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Oops.

To celebrate the recent milestone of reaching 1000 subscribers on my YouTube channel, I accidentally deleted each and every one of them.

Like, poof.

I was checking out who, exactly, had subscribed to me, and I came across one subscriber whose channel apparently didn't exist anymore. So, I pressed the button to remove the channel from my list. A moment later I was back on my main page, and the subscribers list was totally empty.

A quick web search suggests it has to do with hackers, not glitches or personal incompetence. A slightly more thorough web search (checking two message boards instead of just one) suggests it's just a technical glitch that will remedy itself in a few days.

Alarmism seems to be on the rise on YouTube due to a rash of channels being hacked, but whether it's technical or hacknical, I don't see the need to panic. It's not like I want to have anything bad happen to my channel, but subscribers can re-subscribe, and basically everything can be restored in time except the lovely comments. They are quite lovely.

This opens up an interesting experiment, however. It took me about a year and a half to get to 1000 subscribers; how long will it take to reach that number again? Surely a large portion of my subscribers signed up on a whim and won't notice or care about their absence, right? It's not a perfectly controlled experiment, but it'll be interesting to me.

Especially if it's just a technical glitch and I magically gain a thousand subscribers overnight.

It's rare that a post on this blog is this short if it isn't a link or video post, so if you've still got some time to spare, please be sure to check out our easy contest that's going on right now. Long story short, you can win an Amazon.com gift certificate by telling us we've messed up.

Based on the number of entrants we have as I write this, Alex or I will have to take one of those gift cards for ourselves--you can enter almost as many times as you want, but you can only win once, and we don't have enough entrants to give away all the prizes! Entry is a guaranteed win at this point!

Not that we're excited about it or anything. Check it out.

7 comments:

A Philosophical Nerd said...

Hmm. I was subscribed to your YouTube channel. Should I give it a few days to see if it really was a glitch, or should I go ahead and re-subscribe?

Flashman85 said...

Well, when I go to the Post Bulletin option, YouTube still indicates that I have over 1000 subscribers. Am I still listed under your subscriptions? If I'm still there, then just wait a bit, I'd say.

Flashman85 said...

Good news--they're back! Hooray for a fast resolution.

A Philosophical Nerd said...

Yay!

Michael Gray said...

But the easy contest is, like, super hard! You guys never make mistakes.

Flashman85 said...

Michael: It doesn't just have to be our mistakes! The easy ones to look for are broken hyperlinks that weren't broken when we posted them. There's still time left to enter...

Michael Gray said...

Okay, I looked at the "videos" entries for Youtube videos that aren't there anymore, mainly because those are easy to spot (they show up as all black instead of having a screencap). I'm SO entered now.