State of the Sift

My fellow Sifters - I come before you tonight to tell you that the state of the Sift is stronger than ever.

No, seriously - things are good. I know some of you have noticed that it feels bigger around here lately- it is. VideoSift is receiving more traffic than it ever has before. Some of you are nostalgic for the days when the Sift felt like a small group of friends - me too.

We have to make VideoSift work as a bigger group of friends. I think for the most part it is - but we're open to hearing ideas that might help in this area.

We passed 1 million unique visitors for the month of November. It's just a number, but it's an indicator of how this community is growing. Here are the exact stats for the month:

Unique Visits: 1,023,757
Pageviews: 2,713,436
Up Votes: 49,039
Down Votes: 800
Comments: 19,368
videos posted: 1,554

We also banned 45 members. I'm not proud of this - but it shows that our unique moderation system works pretty damn well- thanks to all of the vigilant Sifters who use it and keep the Sift free of self-interest and crap.

We are facing some challenges. Sometimes our servers start melting. During one peak day in November we were serving 10,000 pages an hour and the smell of burning silicon was in the air. We're going to need new hardware. At the moment we are on a single dedicated dual xeon web server with a similarly speced database server. We will undoubtebly need to throw more hardware at the problem soon. Please upgrade to charter if you haven't already - the Sift needs your support- "ten thousand points of light" to keep the flame of VideoSift's fire going.

We have lots of ideas for the next few months. We're thinking of starting a VideoSift online film festival- harking back to the old Sift Off days. We may also start allowing members to upload their own videos to VideoSift (in a way that doesn't violate the self-link rule).

So, from Lucky, James and myself- thanks for being a part of what is, I can say truthfully without any bias, the best community on the web.

Goodnight and may God bless / Darwin evolve / Cthulhu devour VideoSift!

PS. We've outlawed Digg forever and we begin bombing in 5 minutes.

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