Pulled SUSD Review

There was a SUSD review posted today that I was planning to watch later. I even pulled it up to check the runtime (over 25 but under 30 minutes is what I recall) so I’d know how much time to budget for it later. Now the review is gone. Anyone happen to have any insight into why it was pulled this time? A rules snafu or tech glitch that was missed perhaps?

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Audio problem, AFAIK.

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That seems to be happening a lot now… I guess their standards are just too high now for the likes of us :scream_cat::exploding_head:

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Yes, it was audio. Sound kept jumping from left to right speaker.

There’s also a repeated line in the middle which looked like an editing error, but maybe not? It’s still in the new version :slight_smile:

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The new version is only 0.02 seconds shorter, which is probably an encoding twiddle rather than anything deliberate.

ETA: interesting that they re-uploaded it with the same YouTube ID NPeKcxgDvw4, meaning anyone who downloaded from the RSS feed wouldn’t be alerted to a new version (there’s a “modified” date field but most clients don’t check that). Everyone else who replaces videos on YouTube gives them a new ID. I mean, sure, it only affects people like me, but I’m surprised they’re going to this trouble to do things in a non-standard way.

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I gave up on having them in my RSS reader overall because too many things kept going wrong and I didn’t know enough to understand why. Perhaps it’s tied into these type of nonstandard decisions?

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Well, there are three separate RSS feeds which doesn’t help! There’s the main site feed (which used to include the podcasts and videos but doesn’t any more), the podcast feed, and the YouTube channel feed. For a long time the main site feed was completely unavailable, because they were using browser gating to prevent DDoS (i.e. when you connect to the site your browser has to jump through some Javascript hoops to prove it’s a complicated page renderer rather than a simple HTTP grabber) and didn’t make an exception for the RSS (which is supposed to be accessible by a simple HTTP grabber).

And they’re still not putting ID3 tags on the podcast MP3 files.

I mean, none of this is wrong as such – there’s nothing to say you must have a working RSS feed, and tagging MP3s is only standard practice not a requirement. But it all adds friction to what should be a simple process of reading/watching/listening, and since most of the software people use to put sites together now does this stuff automatically it implies that they may be wrestling with a customised tech stack – which frankly is best left to people like me who actually enjoy it. :slight_smile:

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