GeekUtils

Hi There!

We hope you are enjoying our latest apps that now have full YouTube community integration. A few of you have already e-mailed us and asked what it means by “Spam Protection” when you are posting comments or comment replies for videos on YouTube using our apps.

The explanation is simple – kind of. In order for us to integrate all of this new functionality into our apps, we need to use a special set of tools provided by YouTube known as the YouTube Developer API. This set of tools lets us add cool community features into our apps – but along with that functionality comes some restrictions.

When we ran into this SPAM protection during our testing, we contacted YouTube to ask what this means. For those of you who post lots of comments on YouTube, you will notice that if you post several comments in succession quickly, YouTube will present you with a CAPTCHA image and make you respond in order to post your comment. The YouTube API does not have this same “verification” step (yet). So basically, if you begin posting several comments in succession using our app, the YouTube API will respond with a “rate limit” message and will reject your message.

This is not a permanent condition – YouTube only limits your posts for 10 minutes. This is also not just a limit with our application, this is a limit imposed on ANY application that uses YouTube API functionality. This is done to prevent rogue developers from writing applications that simply go through all of the videos on YouTube and post frivolous comments. Unfortunately, there is no way around it at this time. From talking with the YouTube API team – they assure us that the best way to combat this 10 minute lockout is to pace yourself when posting comments. Posting more than 1 comment every couple of minutes will most likely trigger their anti-spam safeguard and will lock out comments from your user account for 10 minutes. If you pace yourself, however, and only post one comment every minute or two – the likelyhood they will reject your comment and limit your account for 10 minutes is much lower.

We have asked the YouTube API team if they have any plans to offer the same CAPTCHA verification in the API, but have yet to receive a response. Trust me when I say – as soon as they offer it, we’ll post an update that utilizes it. In the meantime, pace yourself when posting comments to avoid this situation.

Also, it’s important to note that this lockout only affects comments. Rate, Subscribe, and favorite all you want… these actions are not rate limited.

Because we are offering our applications to users free (and by free, we also mean advertisement free) – the only gratification we receive for our hard work are positive reviews.  The overwhelming number of reviews that we have gathered so far are excellent (5 stars, thank you!) but we want to hear from more of you.  If you are enjoying our applications, please take a moment to rate them.  Remember, each new version can (and should) be re-rated.  If you would like to leave a comment that is great too, but simply rating each version on the star scale is helpful for us to know we are going in the right direction.  To rate the apps now, please follow the appropriate link in the bottom of this message.

If you are having troubles with our apps, or if something just is not working right, Please – Contact us using the “Contact Developer” link in the About tab in any of our apps.  We would love to work with you to find out how we can make the app better for you,  because this also helps us to understand how our applications are behaving “in the field”, and helps us to improve the experience for everyone.

THANK YOU for being a cusotmer!

If you are on your iPhone or iPod touch, use the “More Apps” Tab in our app to automatically launch into our page in the app store to rate our apps.

If you are on a Computer, please click here to rate our Unofficial Shane Dawson app, or click here to rate our Unofficial iJustine app.