A couple days ago, I had the pleasure of encountering this error on YouTube:

Now, the reasons for capping favorites are manifold, but primarily, I suspect to limit gaming/vote inflation on the top favorites leaderboards. That being said, the method of capping (flat cap @ 500) seems like one of the worst ways to do it. Abusers who wish to game the system can simply create new accounts, and an increasing number of good active users will start hitting these limits.

My account, for example, was created in January 21, 2006. That’s about 750 days ago as of today. So a 500-favorite cap means that I’ve favorited an average of 0.67 vids a day. The 1,686 video view count seems low to me, but if we go w/ that, it’s about 30% favorite ratio. I use favorites to mark things I like and want to find again, so that’s probably fairly representative, if not completely accurate.

Since the flat-cap is broken, these numbers point to easy ways to fix things…

• You could actually have a much lower ‘base’ cap (200?) and then add a number based on account age (5/day) — the actual numbers are arbitrary and would depend on analysis of the user activity
• You could add additional complexity like favorite/view %s to flag for abuse or for use in the next scenario
• Alternatively, you could approach this differently by separating the external use case of favorites (leaderboards) with the internal (bookmarking) by simply stopping to count a favorite against a the scoreboard of a video after a certain daily limit. This might introduce complexity the counts are generated, but may overall be a better solution if fake account creation for gaming is a problem.

Lastly, the alternative currently available for users that have run into the cap is to add/move videos into playlists (200 video limit). Unfortunately, adding videos to a playlist is a couple extra clicks vs favoriting, and also the favorite/playlist editing interface is quite clunky for managing hundreds of videos:

• 500 videos, 10 checkboxes/pg = 50 pages
• There is no “move” action, so you have to use a pulldown to “copy” and then click a button to “remove” (you need to reselect all the videos each time! – I mean seriously, which one of you guys thought that was a good idea?)
• There is no “check all” option, meaning you have to manually check each video
• The checkboxes don’t have labels, meaning you can’t just click the row, but you need to hunt and peck for the tiny checkbox
• There is no write API so you can automate this (although a GM script is conceivable, ie for check all or labels

In any case, YouTube favoriting: FAIL!

Update: I started up a simple GM script that would start fixing some of the UI issues w/ the Favorite editing UI. I did the easy ones, allowing a check/uncheck all button and row-clicked selection. The next steps would be to create an AJAX function to copy/remove as a move option and then maybe some sort of AJAX loading function that could allow a user to work on say 20-50 videos at a time.