Google has made more adjustments to the new YouTube commenting system as it aims to reduce spam, but the company isn't giving up on the forced Google+ integration that has had video commenters up in arms.
The company admits that the new system is far from perfect in a blog post written by the hardened old wranglers and guns-for-hire that must make up the YouTube Comments Team.
"While the new system dealt with many spam issues that had plagued YouTube comments in the past," they wrote, "it also introduced new opportunities for abuse and shortly after the launch, we saw some users taking advantage of them."
The updates that have rolled out since the overhaul went live two weeks ago include better bad-link recognition, improved ASCII art (pictures made using type-able characters) detection and a tweak to how long comments are shown onscreen.
Google minus
The main controversy surrounding the new system has been the forced use of Google+ to post comments, Google's social network on which Google is refusing to give up.
It has not gone down well with YouTube users. An online petition to do away with the compulsory Google+ account has reached 216,941 signatures at time of writing. Even YouTube's co-founder Jawed Karim was baffled, asking "Why the f*** do I need a Google+ account to comment on a video?"
But there's no mention of the Google+ integration in the comment team's blog post - it looks as though that is here to stay.
- Google is trolling us all with its mandatory Google+ YouTube logins, says Marc Chacksfield
