Here's a few questions:
- How many YouTube objects can a person embed in a post/sig? I hope there is a cap... and not a simple verbal one. There should be a physical cap. Same for IMG.
- Have you tested having a topic with 15+ YouTube objects on a single page for server load, page weight, loading times? A typical topic shows 15 posts, so one object per post on a given page.
- Are there any safeguards to prevent people from freely posting porn other than word-of-mouth? You think the bots posting links to porn sites are a nuisance, think again. Its bad enough Google AdSense is farked up.
- Can I filter out YouTube objects like I can IMG, Sigs, etc?
My main concerns are twofold: First, the lack of moderating that is already taking place coupled with the now large possibility of triple-X attacks is going to be a mess. Secondly, the page weight issue. HTML objects take up unnecessary space whether or not you have them set to automatically play. The player itself must be loaded into memory on people's computer, whether they want to view it or not. The more players on a page, the more being loaded into memory. While it might seem minuscule at first, not everyone wants to waste CPU cycles and volatile memory on things that we didn't even ask for.
I'm not saying you should remove the stuff, but those are definitely things that need to be investigated, not simply thrown under the rug. When it bites you in the ass, its already too late.
EDIT: I went ahead and decided to test my theory out and my results were quite appalling. While not scientific fact by any means, the numbers speak for themselves. I let each page load completely and then scrolled through the entire page.
The following is various RAM Memory Usages for FireFox based on listed settings. I used this topic(copied as to protect the original) to conduct the test, adding YouTube objects one-by-one and checking the memory usage based on a fresh load of the page including the browser itself. I had only one browser open and only one tab at any given time. I included the base number for observation sake since every computer could be slightly different on how much base memory is being used.
- 0 YouTube objects in a topic: 57,680 K
- 1 YouTube objects in a topic: 60,776 K
- 2 YouTube objects in a topic: 65,200 K
- 15 YouTube objects in a topic: 101,540 K
Yes... 101 megabytes of RAM being ate up for one topic. And no, you have no caps on how many I can put in one post. Notice also, none of the movies were actively running... thats just the OBJECT ITSELF. I find that rather troublesome.