Blog

Parting Ways

Jan 18, 2023
Kuz's involvement with VidLii has long been a topic surrounded by rumors and misconceptions. With this post, I'd like both to clear up any confusion on the matter, as well as to make an announcement regarding his future role amongst our staff.

Firstly, VidLii has always been under my ownership ever since the transfer back in February 2022, and I—not Kuz—have always had the final say when it comes to decisions about the site. While Kuz may have been more actively involved in VidLii's management earlier on, he was never the owner or ultimate authority at any point, and as time progressed, his involvement gradually diminished.

As we now approach a full year of VidLii being under my ownership, I've decided to bring to a close my collaboration with Kuz in running the site. Kuz has formally departed our staff, and no longer plays any part in VidLii's management nor moderation; all policy decisions from now on will come solely from me. I'd like to thank him for all the time, energy, and resources which he's contributed, and I'd also like to ask everybody not to bother him with any questions or complaints, but instead direct any issues towards our moderators or to me—we're always here to help out!

—lolwut

Summer Updates!

Jul 29, 2022
We've been hard at work this summer improving VidLii, both by fixing existing issues and by implementing new features. Over the the past month or two, we've been gradually rolling out these updates, and while some of our more attentive users might already have noticed and taken advantage of them, I thought it best to inform everybody with a news post. Here is a summary of the most significant improvements:

• A large portion of VidLii's back-end has been optimized—this means much faster load times for everybody!
• We've added three new search operators to the search bar to enhance its precision:
    • Enclose a phrase in double quotation marks to find all exact matches—for example, "happy birthday vidlii".
    • Put a plus sign before a word to require that all results contain the term—for example, video sharing sites +vidlii.
    • Put a minus sign before a word to exclude all results that contain the term—for example, history of vidlii -youtube.
• The related videos algorithm has been reworked completely to deliver vastly better suggestions.
• In addition to relevance, video search results can now be ranked by date of upload, view count, and how many comments they've received.
• You can now search through all of your uploads directly from your channel, as well as sort your videos by date of upload, number of views they've accumulated, and comment count. This functionality has been added to all three channel versions.
• VidLii now supports many more image formats: you can now upload PNG, BMP, GIF (including animated GIFs!), WebP, TIFF, and APNG images.
• All video comments you've posted can now be edited as many times as you want.
• The ban notice banner now displays the reason for the account's ban.
• Various other enhancements and bug fixes, both major and minor.

None of these changes would have been possible without the contributions of our highly talented developer 藍象, whom I have had the pleasure of working with these past handful of months. I feel very fortunate to have become acquainted not only with 藍象, but with the entire VidLii and Kolyma staff—much has been accomplished already with their assistance, and there is still plenty more to come.

—lolwut

Staffing Changes and Clarification of Moderation Policies

Apr 08, 2022
During the past few days, I've noticed that there has been substantial confusion and misconceptions regarding both the reasons for the recent staff changes, as well as my overall intentions for VidLii and BitView. I hope to clarify things here for everybody.

Firstly, and most importantly, neither VidLii nor BitView are, or will ever become, mouthpieces for any political agenda—the sites will always remain officially neutral with respect to all such matters, and will never endorse any specific viewpoint. They're simply here to be the platforms for you to upload and share the videos that matter to you, to express the beliefs that are important to you, and to discover and connect with those whom you share interests with.

Of course, this also applies to the VidLii and BitView staff, who are free to register accounts and upload videos advocating a particular cause or stance, whatever it may be, so long as their content and conduct do not break a rule in the Community Guidelines. One of the things which the staff strives for is fairness, and it would be unfair to remove any user's videos—including a staff member's—for anything other than a Community Guidelines violation.

This is why we had to make some staff changes recently: we had a staff member who, unfortunately, went beyond his given authority, taking action multiple times against videos and accounts that were not in violation of the Community Guidelines. We hold our staff very strictly to this policy—that only Community Guidelines violations should ever be punished, and that users should never have to log in one day to find that they've suddenly had their videos removed, received a strike, or even been banned for something that they thought was perfectly acceptable because it wasn't against the rules.

Regrettably, Vistafan disagreed with our staffing changes and resigned from any further programming work on BitView. We're disappointed to see him leave, and his departure will mean a temporary slowdown in new features for BitView, but we're still quite confident in our ability to make continued improvements to the site.

There are no immediate or future threats to the ongoing stability of both sites, and everyone involved must move on and accept these staffing changes so that progress can continue.

I realize that many users have encountered videos on VidLii and/or BitView that they disagree with, and sometimes strongly so; on sites like these with such a wide variety of material, such disagreements are inevitable. It is not the job of the staff, however, to censor controversial but otherwise permitted content from the sites; instead, we encourage you to upload your own videos in order to counter opinions you disagree with. I firmly believe that VidLii and BitView will be at their best and most enjoyable when they have brought back the freedom that characterized old YouTube.

—lolwut

Video and Audio Quality Improvements

Feb 16, 2022
After years of being subpar, I am very pleased to report that video quality for all users' uploads has finally been improved to an acceptable standard! In addition, we've also significantly enhanced audio quality for all VidLii Partner channels. I encourage everybody to take advantage of these recent improvements, and upload more videos—there is no need anymore to fear VidLii's notoriously heavy video and audio compression.

—lolwut

VidLii's Live!

Feb 11, 2022
The whole of VidLii's data and software was moved to new servers a few days ago. As often happens with a site of this scale, the transfer was not without its unforeseen issues which resulted in a slight delay to restoring full functionality, but I have been continually impressed with the incredible dedication and skill with which the team at the Kolyma Network has tackled things. What could have taken weeks with other providers has only taken a few days in this instance, and I consider myself very fortunate to have selected them as VidLii's new host.

The annoying and intrusive advertising has, as promised, been completely removed; VidLii is currently operating with zero ads. New account registrations—previously disabled due to a bug that existed before the change in ownership, and which the Kolyma team has quickly fixed—are also working properly again. Many other miscellaneous problems which arose due to the server transfer have all been fixed, to my amazement, within only a day or so.

I am thus very happy to announce that VidLii is fully functional on our new infrastructure. This is only the beginning—we have been making rapid progress, and have plans for many new improvements!

—lolwut

Statistic and Development Updates

Apr 06, 2019
Hello everyone!

We have some new Updates about Development and Statistics on VidLii.

Let's start with VidLii Statistics:

- Total Users: 18,095
- Channel 1.0 Users: 12,764
- Channel 2.0 Users: 3,905
- Cosmic Panda Users: 1,426
- Channel Views: 1,472,622
- Channel Comments: 100,006
- Subscriptions: 82,974
- Partners: 281
- Total Videos: 68,909
- Total Views: 2,851,001
- Minutes Watched: 1,238,846 since august
- Video Comments: 126,416
- Total Favorites: 64,847
- Total Playlists: 2,393

Now let's talk about Development on VidLii

Features that have recently been added:

- New Sign In Box Interface
- More options to the Channels Page (Most Discussed and Top Rated)
- Changed the Related Videos algorithm so that it doesn't recommend the same 5 videos for all eternity.
- Improved the API. Check whats new!

What's coming soon:

- New Video Player
- Annotations
- A server switch, Features such as 1080p Video Quality for Partners and 480p for non partners will be coming when VidLii switches servers.

To get Updates on VidLii Development, You can join the VidLii Dev Discord Server or Follow the VidLii Twitter
I also opened a new Public VidLii Discord Server. If you want to join Here is an invite!

Thats all for now, Thank you for reading!
- BMF

New Moderator

Feb 25, 2019
Hey everyone, I'm the new moderator on VidLii. if you have any questions or anything
Just message me!

Btw while we're here, we should go over some stats again for the first time in a while.

- Total Users: 16,990
- Channel 1.0 Users: 11,880
- Channel 2.0 Users: 3,747
- Watched Videos: 1,517,461
- Channel Comments: 94,731
- Partners: 256
- Total Videos: 65,154
- Total Views: 2,633,181
- Video Comments: 121,191
- Total Playlists: 2,309

-BMF

The Most Important Blog Post Update Of All Time

May 08, 2018
- Made logo proportional

The past and the future™

Dec 23, 2017
It's been some time since I (Jan) made a blog post and I think now is a very good time to make one.

First of all I'd like to thank all of you who have supported VidLii in the past 6 months. I certainly didn't expect this project, which originally was nothing more than a joke that was going to be removed after around a week, to be where it is now.
It's awesome to see how big this community has become, and how it has evolved from around 15-20 VBF refugees to around 6000 users from many parts of the Internet.
And while not everything has been running smooth and friendly, it worked out in the end.

So now here is the long awaited stat update:
- 5,672 users
- 3,791 use Channel 1.0
- 1,401 use Channel 2.0
- 480 use Cosmic Panda
- 80 partners

- 18,568 videos
- 517,311 total views
- 43,539 total video comments
- 711 playlists
- 35,374 channel comments
- 49,814 ratings
- 17,770 favorites
- 672 video responses
- 35,798 subscriptions

Records
- Most Viewed of All Time: Knotsnappy
- Most Subscribed of All Time: NFKRZ
- Most Channel Comments: TheVideoGamer64
- Most Videos watched: Adel123Essam (7806)
- Most Channel Views: TheVideoGamer64 (6792)
- Most Videos: KnotSnappy (285)
- Most subscriptions: 11pixels (1876)
- Worst rated comment: plasmyte (-35)
- Best rated comment: NermalCat79 (75)

Quite the upgrade from last blog post, right?
Now I'd like to talk a bit over the future of VidLii.

As you may or may not have already found out, the community guidelines changed a bit. Generally no major changes.
Just stay out of drama and especially don't start it.
Racist videos and comments will also be deleted from now on and not completely ignored.
It's unfortunate that I had to do this, but a certain group of kids have nothing better to do than be an ass on VidLii the whole day.

Now on the brighter side, some cool features for the future:
- Mobile App
- Groups
- Vertical channel module alignment
- Annotations
- More Playlist Settings

Another thing that is planned for VidLii is a complete rewrite. The exact date isn't set in stone yet. It may happen between the above mentioned features, before or after.
The rewrite will include lots of smaller cool features, bug fixes and the ability to add new features faster.

So that's it for now. Thanks again to the official VidLii discord members, VidLiis Twitter followers, former VidBit members, ZippCast, Google (YouTube), Ali, AM, tw03.
There's a good chance that if a single person mentioned above didn't exist, VidLii wouldn't exist.

Thank you for reading this.
~Jan

New Update Time!

Oct 26, 2017
Does anyone still read the blog? Well that doesn't matter as you're reading it now! Yes, these things have already been announced ages ago but it's about time the old blog got an update in more than a month. So, here's what's new:

Achievements! (Get notified for what you've accomplished!)
Simple update that tells you what you've achieved while supplying a bit of trivia about your own channel! Pretty cool, isn't it?

Themes! (Be stylish!)
Yes. Customize Vidlii to your desires without the need of an extension. Go crazy! Make themes for other people to use or use ones people have already created!

Awards! (You're on the records!)
Get awards for what you've achieved on Vidlii! Are you the #3 most viewed of this week in Gurus? Then display it loud and proud! Be proud that you are the #3 most viewed this week in Gurus.

Cosmic Panda! (Blast off into nostalgia!)
Ahh, 2012. When the world wasn't hellish. The peak of YouTube. Everything was going great. The Cosmic Panda channel layout was released with all sorts of backlash because people hate change. Well that and it was forced. We don't force it! It's completely up to you if you want to use the Cosmic Panda layout. (I like it.)

Now that we've told you all about these updates... why are you still reading this??? Go out there and use what we've just told you! Now enjoy the rest of your day or something!

~Database, your friendly moderator

New Comments Section!

Sep 20, 2017
I'm sorry for the late post again, but here it is:

So you might have noticed a change. That's right! A new comments section!
The new comments section has a new design and features to go along with it.
Some of these features have been highly requested, and we've listened!
Here's what's new:

Replies! You can now reply to a comment without having to mention the user. Not only is this better to use, it's easier to use for any newcomers who may find their way on to VidLii. It also doesn't cause a mess when it comes to comments as everything is neatly sorted in the new replies feature.

Top comments! Top comments have found their way on to Vidlii after being abandoned for years. The new (or should I say old... new? new's a pretty good buzzword so I'll go with that) top comments feature now shows the top 2 most liked comments at the top.

Channel icons are now in the comments section! Self-explanatory.

Again I apologize for the late post. I hope everyone reading this has a good day. :)

-Database, your friendly mod

The New VidLii Player (with customization) has been released!

Sep 15, 2017
Something that has been in the works for quite some time...
A brand new VidLii Player has been released!

Well... it's been out for some time but it just recently received an upgrade!

The new player has gained the ability to be customized with any color you'd like!
Change the progress bar color. Change the button color. The options are endless!

...actually, there are 274,941,996,890,625 different combinations.

Pretty much endless though!

Well, that's that for that quick announcement...

-Database

Partnership

Aug 28, 2017
After a few months in development, Partnership is here and finished. We already have a few partners before I wrote this blog post, but it is now here. Here is a list of our current partners:

11pixels
11ryanc
AM
BigMushroomFan
Cazzy
CraftingLord21
CrazyMarioBros
Database
DWYTGaming
FatCatVG
HardDiskDriveTV
InsanitySurfers
Kazaria
KratosTheGodOfWar
KudoJin
LiiNews
MemphisLarsen
MrATAndreiThomas
NermalCat79
RedExec
SabelNoxz
TCT101
WeatherFreak91
azoko
edray1416
pivot2parodies
vistafan12

These are our current partners and this list is expected to grow over time. Thank you for using VidLii.

~Database

Partnership

Aug 28, 2017
Partnership is here! You can now apply to be a partner.

Numbers.

Jul 28, 2017
It's been a while, it's time for a new blog post.

I this blog post I'll mainly make some stats about VidLii public which may or may not interest you. But I'll also tease some upcoming stuff at the end.

First of all let's start with the simple stuff:
- 768 Users
- 510 Unique Users
- 710 Activated Users
- 290 Use Channel 2.0

- 2090 Videos
- 46410 Views
- 4623 Comments
- 5655 Ratings
- 2266 Favorites

- Records
- Knotsnappy (Most Viewed Channel
- AM (Most subscribed Channel | Not counting VidLii)
- TheVideoGamer64 (Most Channel Comments (1345) Written)
- Azoko (Most videos watched (2075))
- AM (Most Channel Views)
- Cazzy (Most Friends (211))
- 2017 (Oldest Channel)

Thank you for every member of VidLii. You're the reason why this place is so fun for everyone.

Some of the upcoming features are:
- Block Feature
- Custom Channel Font
- Homepage Customization
- Better Video / Audio Quality
- VidLii API
- VidLii Partners

The days & Weeks ahead

Jun 15, 2017
It's been a bit since the last blog post and I thought I'd let you know about the future of this website.

First of all I want to thank the users who use VidLii and motivate me to add new and exciting features.

The main features that were recently added are:
- Channel Backgrounds
- Channel Title, Description and keywords
- Avatar Uploads and Filters
- Channel Comments
- Other smaller things.

That's quite a bit for 3-4 days, so you can probably imagine how feature-rich VidLii is going to be in a month.
Here's some things I'm currently working on and will be released soon:
- Channel Transparency
- My Videos Page
- Playlists
- Featured Channels
- Bulletins
- Channel 2.0
- VidLii API

Also expect the VidLii design to change during that time to something better since the current design is based on the 2006 YouTube design and is limiting my ability to add new things.

~ Jan

NEW UPDATE & Why the name change?

Jun 11, 2017
First, lets start with the good news:
The site has been completely rewritten because the old code just couldn't be worked with.
That means that most of the things you complained about during the last 5 days is probably fixed or improved. Some of the changes are:
1. Featured | Recently Viewed pages now work.
2. Pages go up to 10 now.
3. Profile now work like "/user/VidLii" instead of "profile?user=vidlii"
4. Way more channel customization options (MORE TO COME).
5. Better video quality (Max filesize is now 350MB).
6. More file types supported.
7. Uploader has been improved.
8. Categories have been added.
9. A better looking friends tab.
10. HTTPS
11. UTF-8 character support
12. Some images are now in much higher quality

Those are some of the changes I can think of right now. Since that update was somewhat of an emergency there may be a few bugs which you can report to me in the discord:LINK

Now to the bad news: VidBit had to be renamed to VidLii due to threats of being sued due to me selling the previous version of VidBit to someone who apparently counted the name and logo "vidbit" as an asset.

For now vidbit.co still redirect to vidlii but that may change in the future.

Thanks to the community for staying loyal.

~Jan