Improved commenting and improved documentation

Commenting

The Vidbeo online video platform has always supported commenting to let your video viewers provide their thoughts on your content. We supported comments both in the API and also within our own administration section. However over time it became clear that since commenting is not an area we focus on, it was harder to devote the time and resources to make the process of managing and moderating comments as simple as it should be.

We therefore started researching alternative video commenting solutions.

One of the most popular online commenting plug-ins is Disqus. We decided to incorporate it since many users already have an account - and if not, it is free to create one.

This is now rolling out. Next time you sign in to the video hosting admin panel, if you click on the ‘Account’ section, you should see a new section called ‘Comments’. Within that you can provide your Disqus short-name. This is the account you wish comments on your videos to be linked to. For example if your Disqus URL is abc.disqus.com then their short-name would be abc.

Once you have provided that, you can enable comments on a per-video basis. Simply tick the box on each video’s page - you will find it in its ‘Details’ tab. Having done that, when someone watches your video either within the video platform, or on its own share-link, they will see the Disqus plug-in with the option to comment on it.

In the image below, we created a sample comment on one of our own videos. In reality a viewer would see their own name and avatar - and of course wouldn’t be a moderator, so they wouldn’t see the options to manage comments:

You are able to easily moderate comments on any of your videos from within Disqus. Once you sign in to their system, you will see a panel for each of your sites. There you will see recent comments on each of your pages. You can edit or delete comments from there, and those changes will be immediately reflected on our pages.

Note: These comments do not travel with our iframe embed code, since we are not able to assign space on your web pages. However you are free to include the Disqus code yourself on your own page if you would like the same video comments to appear there too: just contact us to find out how.

Documentation

We have always tried to clearly document our APIs online, however our developers site has been given a bit of a refresh.

On larger screens, the screen now divides into sections, clearly dividing the description of each endpoint with sample requests & responses. These are formatted with line numbers to clarify how they work in practice.

Hopefully it is easy to use, but please contact us at [email protected] if you have any questions about the new commenting integration, the API, or our professional video hosting.

Updated: October 4, 2016