After discussions with the other Admins, we've decided that we will no longer allow .MOV files to be uploaded to Gallery effective immediately. The majority of members are unable to view this file type and it causes complaints. These files are also very large and take up space which is wasteful when most are unable to view it anyway.

We require videos to be linked from youtube. Going forward any .MOV file seen uploaded will be deleted and a reminder sent. If you have some already, we ask that you please delete or replace them.  PDF and GIF files will continue to be allowed, though we ask that you upload GIFs sparingly.

Wouldn't be better automatically convert all videos to mp4 via ffmpeg?

At present we discourage the upload of video files to the site due to space, performance and accessibility concerns.

We may in the future look into the potential to add video capabilities... but don't expect this anytime soon as we have other items on the agenda we're looking into at the moment. So everyone will need to continue to upload to youtube and link to the site as normal.

It's probably easier for everyone to use YouTube iframes, better for google to pay for the storage space than the operators of this site (honestly don't know how this makes any money since there's no ads)

Easier, yes. However, dead links from defunct image or video hosting sites (or deleted users) are a big problem on forums. Think about Photobucket, Mediafire, Putfile and many others. It is a big unknown how long Youtube will survive AND if it will remain open for everyone, regardless of whether they go along with various countries' draconian social media identification rules.

Ideally the forum hosts it, as well as the maker of the video on Youtube. But i fully understand that it is a non trivial amount of web space and bandwith that you need for video hosting for the gallery.

Another thing is, youtube tends to just shadowban users with no reasoning provided on the basis of one "negative" comment.

But that does not influence your ability to see the files. Shadowbanning means your own uploads do not get selected by the Holy Algorhythm anymore, not showing up in feeds.

Yes, true. But if you haven't shared a link (very unlikely, yes) to the video and just shared the title, and your channel gets shadowbanned, your video won't show up even if you search for the exact title. Otherwise this is fine, cause even if you're shadowbanned, you can still share video URLs.