The absolute dire state of the website and video playback

Let me be clear, I have been patient for over 10 months for the video playback issues to be fixed. This is getting ridicilous now. The part that was never uploaded to YT means that a part of the videos will be inaccesible for me and many others who tried the bullshit with fiddling around with cookies and settings and still have no luck. Save your empty PR responses like "We understand you're frustrated" or "We're working on it" because they both do not yield any result.

The website is pretty broken as is, at least the video player should work. Did you straight up lie when getting acquired by Fandom about how the site is getting reinvigorated?

As a longtime user with absolutely no inside information my perception is that the "site" is no longer the actual website but rather the...brand for lack of a better word. The Bombcast was always a huge part of the business model and most people don't listen to that through the site, but I think they've also moved most of their video viewers to Twitch and maybe some Youtube. If you look at comment numbers on the actual site hosted videos they're tiny. Comments are not always a good proxy for viewers, but they tell you something. Currently most videos get like 0-10 comments. In the old days they would often get 50+. That suggests that on site viewership has fallen off a cliff (though I suppose it's possible that it's JUST commenting for some reason.)

Given that it's not hard to understand why the difficult and expensive work of fixing the video player would not be the highest priority in what is already clearly a scaled down operation (they went from 3 video producers to 1, for example.) It's also not clear how you can reinvigorate viewership on site when that model is pretty dead around the Internet. How many operations actually host their own video these days?

I'm not saying it's right or you're wrong to be frustrated, I'm just saying that we have to be realistic about what they have resources to do and what they need to prioritize. They absolutely could be more transparent about this stuff instead of saying "we'll look into it" and leaving it for months, but transparency has never been a strong suit around here.

User to user I do understand your frustration with certain things but at this point the site pretty much is what it is and I'm sure if you keep poking them they'll get to it whenever they're able, but hostility isn't going to make that happen faster.

Matt Rorie was the main guy who used to handle all of this stuff dealing with how the website ran. But he quit a year or so ago. I don't know who is running the website now. I just know it's no longer any of the OGs. This just shows how crucial he was to the site and how he is now missed.

Rorie went above (and beyond) but surely the money premium subs spend are going to maintainance of the website as well? Or was that a farce as well?

Fandom won’t “fix” or improve this site. They share engineering teams across all their properties and this one is at the bottom of the priority list.

Maybe if the site was full of affiliate link-ridden SEO garbage articles that generated revenue they’d bother a little more.

Then at the very least they could be upfront about it and tell us that the website is abandoned

@nikyuningen: It's likely that premium subs are the reason the site hasn't been pulled down or completely converted into the Fandom format yet. Hosting all that video is expensive and the premium subs pay for that.

Fandom doesn't "care" about Giant Bomb. When Whisky Media started it was partly a business, of course, but also partially a passion project, which shined through in a lot of ways. As GB has been passed around from company to company it has become just another portfolio property and the people signing on the budgets and allocating resources may not have even seen the site let alone care about it.

The people actually working on the site have a lot of passion and are still dedicated but I don't think they have the power in the organization that Gerstmann did at some of the previous parents (though he has talked a lot about how hard he had to fight) and their focus is new video production, which is presumably what the bigger bosses want most right now.

Bottom line is this: you want to engage with the rest of the community? You have to go to the discord, subreddit (ugh), resetera thread, YouTube comments (ugh). The forums and comments here are mostly dead, the former is dominated by the same handful of people vying for their spot in the “community spotlight” (ha) on a dying site.

You want to watch the video content? Go to the YouTube channel. Pretty sure all the legacy content will eventually be moved there too, and the custom CDN will be killed off due to it not generating revenue since they aren’t injecting preroll ads into the content served from there.

As I said, my primary concern is video playback on a video focused website. I don't want to engage in a dying community, plenty of better ways to do so if I really wanted to. I made my peace with the RV and Fandom takeovers and all that entails but at the very least be transparant.

Well, if it makes you feel better, Gamespot a much bigger and supported site by Fandom, also has the cookies based playback function on their website. So the video playback problems also happen there.

Is this some form of bot training? Can people who have been active on the
website for 4 hours really only be negative and have nothing original or constructive to say?

Ah so pointing out glaring issues that a lot of people are frustrated with is "being negative". Gotcha, when can I expect my ban for criticism?

It's this that gets me really. I wish they wouldn't lie about fixes being "In the works"

If the site is defunct, just admit it, rather than the 50 or so of us that use the site keep propping up the forums live in hope and die in despair

Did they not get the old video player in the purchase? Can't they just put that back temporarily, or is there some user tracking in the Fandom player that they don't want to lose? If they want to track something, they should track where I stopped watching a video.

It's not all Fandom's fault. The site started being actively hard to use and navigate in the last redesign, around 2019. I still think of this as "the new design" because I've never felt comfortable finding my way around. The video player collapsing in on itself is just following suit.

First off, I have no idea how specifically the GB back end is setup. But, having worked on website engineering for a very long time, there could be a myriad of reasons why something is busted, especially when they're operating at scale. Old libraries that don't work anymore, reference to an old server, lack of documentation means nobody actually understands what's going on, etc. Running a website these days is way more than grabbing a bunch of source code and throwing it on a server, especially when you're operating at scale, and especially when you're serving media at scale.

So, in other words, there are potentially hundreds of valid technical reasons why a website video player won't work, and a lot of them aren't easily fixed. Doubly so if you don't have resources in terms of engineering talent or time.

Not excusing things here -- the legacy of GB is in its video archives, and knowing that one day a lot of that legacy is going to go POOF makes me sad. Just pointing out that, if it was an easy fix, they probably would have done it already.

Once Jason and Jess were let go, it was a miracle Jan was able to keep things going with video archives til he got some help.

But I've given up on stuff being uploaded here consistently. Which sucks, because I don't use Twitch and now I have constant ads on Youtube. What goes under Videos and what goes under Live on there? Who knows! I'll occasionally post on the forums or videos, but once Discord became the main place to go I sort of gave up on GB's community aspect, too.

In short, as someone that was on this site daily for the better part of 15 years, it's obviously a low priority now. So it's a low priority for me, too.

The lack of replies from any real staff members (Grubb/Dan/Jan) etc is deafening

@sombre: Other than Rorie, I never got the impression that any of the other staff were interested in communicating on the forums. I suspect, especially in this instance, that it would be somebody we don't see the face of very often or ever. And would think that it would fall to emailing the actual support section on the website for an issue like this. Even then, its not clear whether the staff are even allowed to talk about it. I could be wrong.

It's not just a GB thing. It seems to be a Fandom issue. Because Gamespot also has the "Do Not Sell" function that you have to manually set to watch videos linked on their site. The feature is supposed to protect users from having their cookies tracked by advertisers, unless you give the permission to do so by changing the settings. The downside is that this also affects the video player, because of ads. I believe the reason you're not hearing anything from the GB staff, is because they literally can't do anything about it. The people behind Fandom's websites are responsible.

And some of you guys forget, the GB staff are just employees of Fandom now. They are not the independent owners of this site like in the old days. It's like the complaint box a company has for employees that barely gets looked at by the higher ups. It's just there for people to vent. For all we know, a staff member did mention this to someone at Fandom. And Fandom not caring about this site said "meh"...

I switched to GB player since video removed from YT due to copyright (SSX) but now can't get back to YT player which is way better. Is there really no way to switch back now? They used to have the "..." icon to switch and I don't see anything in settings. Help?

@lonelyspacepanda: No one is going to help you. This dilapidated website is abandoned, as evidenced by Fandom not even putting a single engineer to fix problems and those responsible for the website being awfully mum.

Unfortunately, in this specific case, after referring to @dtoast, this is a problem on YouTube's end and there's no real remedy for videos that got blocked on YouTube due to music copyright issues or DMCA. Even if the video was fine for years on YouTube, a music rights holder likely ran an algorithm or bot and automatically flagged it to be taken down.

It might be worth also considering that the video playing issues on the site are very hyper-specific problems. I currently watch videos on GB's site from the following places; Windows 10 PC Chrome & Edge browsers, Windows 11 PC on Chrome & Firefox browsers, and (yes, no joke) the browser on my PS4. I only ever had about a week of issues playing videos way back when problems first began for others and not only do I not run into issues now, I also have never had to clear cookies or play around with any popup messages or anything like that., including leaving my popup blockers and things like Privacy Badger on. I feel like at this point the issues might be specific to the settings/extensions/etc. that people might elect to use and there must be some magic combinations of those breaking everything.

First off: I don't currently have any issues with videos playing on any browsers (Chrome/FFox/Edge) on my couple of PCs at home (with adblockers installed) or phones here, except for ads which should be run past community manager dtoast if they're political, against site rules, or ridiculously bad. That last one I've included since I think it will affect other Fandom sites too.

My browsers are pretty vanilla installs, just adblock and/or plus, with a theme manager, and a download manager. No scripting helper extensions to be specific (I used to use one years ago), but other people will have various extensions installed and different options set in their browsers though. Also different levels of experience when reporting the problem. As such with all of these variable factors I don't envy a web developer trying to fix these issues. I do wish it was easy, I had one boss give me a funny look when he saw me using different browsers for testing software because he thought the web was universal, then in my next job the guy next to me said "oh we don't use Chrome <for that specific task>, it only works 100% in Edge. He was 100% right, it may have been a Windows system administration policy issue but I wasn't about to test it for them being on a short term contract.

Regarding transparency, I have raised some bugs myself and others mentioned issues they were having. There was a Town Hall meeting on 07/07/23 - I volunteered to ask about it for them rather than everybody taking up time with similar questions. Knowing I had limited time, I asked the most leading question I could think of which hopefully covered bug fixes. I've done enough, I'm not going to get involved in a summary of all the Q&A, you can hear the non-premium session here: https://www.giantbomb.com/shows/discord-town-hall-07-07-23/2970-22414/free-podcast

It's not though. That's what's so weird about the video player problems. I was using Firefox on Windows 11 too, just like you were. I had every extension disabled, had cleared my cache, and done everything that was necessary to fix the problem but still couldn't get older videos to play.

The extra weird thing for me is I cancelled my premium until the player was fixed since that's what I had stayed subscribed to premium for, and as soon as my account was downgraded the player started working flawlessly again. Like I literally opened a non-premium video that hadn't been working for me a couple days previous and it was suddenly working again. It makes absolutely no sense.

At this point I'm just downloading videos to an external harddrive, I have zero faith that "Fandom" is going to even keep videos archived or hosted on the site from day-to-day.

@mekon: That Town Hall meeting was over 7 months ago. We’re nearing a year of video playback issues. I am still waiting for an reply from an actual staff member on the dire state of things.

I would encourage people to cancel their premium subs because hurting Fandom financials seems to be the only thing to bring change about.

I think you're not reading what I said. Consider that there are other people in this conversation who might appreciate what I mentioned.

I am not engaging in further debate on this with you.

You’re using a personal anecdote which anounts to nothing relevant when these issues have been known for close to a year now.

@ben_h: Wow, that is weird (regarding when it started working again). Head scratcher for sure....

Might sound mean but at this point I think much better for the site to shut down, let fans build their own fan version to help archive, and existing team go Patreon route.

As for player tech issues, you'd be surprised how much gets solved by clearing site cache on your browser -- which really speaks to how simple these issues are to solve but site doesn't have resources or morale to care.