The long awaited Proxy Support for Tube Toolbox has arrived (see screen shot below).

On a side note, it's about time to bring some life-support in for this blog. It has been dead for a long time but we plan on making some changes soon to bring it back to life. We'll give it a new look and a new attitude. Not only will it have information about our new Tube Toolbox release, it will include general YouTube and Marketing talk. Want to Guest-Blog? Email us!

New Features:

* Import / Export Messages: You can move messages between accounts or between computers just my exporting and importing them.

  (screen shot of the bottom of 'add messages' screen)

* Include "Unknown Failures" when Selecting Recipients: Instead of always including unknown failures (which seemed to confuse the heck out of everyone), it is now a check box and defaulted to Unchecked. If checked, it will include people in the list who you have sent to in the past but got an "Unknown Failure" response.

Fixes:

* Commenting on Videos: Was broken because of recent YouTube changes but fixed now. (note: I only tested quicklyand it seemed to work so if you still have problems, post your exact comment and what error you receive into our forums and we'll work on fixing the problem)

* Fixed blocked pages: We had 1 user who's computer would not allow pages to render that contained "xxx" in the user's username and caused an infinie delay. This has been resolved.

* Fixed bad usernames: There seemed to be bad usernames in people's database which caused problems and many of them will be corrected when you run this new version.

Of course the 1 weekend out of the whole year that I'm camping and have no Internet access, YouTube decided to completely revamp their website and take down most Tube Toolbox features in the process. The good news is that you are paying $7.95 which means we have to keep up our end of the bargain to you and fix everything as soon as possible. We have already fixed most features but some were still acting funny. I *think* everything should be working now and of course, let us know if not. 

Fixes

* Bulk Comments: We finally figured out that the new YouTube Channel layout/style was the culprit. That's why a few of the older channels could have comments posted to them but none of the new ones. You should now be able to post to ALL channels again.

* Bulk Share Video: So when you're sharing a video, it gets sent to 5 people at a time. If one of those people has "friend lock" on their account which means they will only accept messages from Friends, the video does not get sent to them. Tube Toolbox was then checking your 'Sent Folder' for their username to make sure it got sent but not finding it so it would retry. and retry. and retry. This is not good. When sending messages, it is 1 user at a time so YouTube tells us "This user only accepts messages from Friends" and we can work with that. So... Now, we check to make sure that ANY of the 5 people show up in your sent folder. If it happens that all 5 people have "Friend Lock", then you would get stuck in the infinite loop again which is bad. Because of this, we changed the default "Check Sent Folder" checkbox to Un-Checked. 

* Bulk Message Sending:  There seemed to be one particular case that we can into when messages were looking like they were not sent but they actually were so that is fixed.

New Features/Changes

* Delete User Account: You can now completely delete and remove User accounts from your Tube Toolbox database. On the Log-In screen, select the user in the drop down list and press the Delete key on your Keyboard. It will prompt you to delete the user. NOTE: This removes all sending history from the user account so if you sent a message to someone from the deleted account and are Selecting Recipients when sending from a new account, you could end up sending to someone who you already sent from. Keep that in mind. We will change this in the next version.

* Added "5,000" to Friends/Subscriber filter: Added new option between 1,000 and 10,000. It's 5,000!

* Added "Max Unknown Failure": When YouTube made changes earlier this week, it caused many people to have hundreds or even thousands of Unknown Failures which cause some issues. Now, you can specificy a number of continuous Failure Unknown errors before Tube Toolbox automatically stops sending. The default is "5". From the main menu, click "Options", then "Settings" and you will see it. 

* Increased Display Size for Additional Accounts: When selecting additional accounts in Bulk  Message Sending or Bulk Share Video, the box is wider so people with long names can tell the accounts apart. 

* Unknown Failures included when Selecting Recipients: Now, if you had an Unknown Failure when sending, those users will still show up when Selecting Recipients. Before they would be filtered out which caused people to lose hundreds or thousands of users because of the most recent YouTube changes.

Version 2.8.8.0 comes with new in-program debugging information.

 If you ever have problems with any "Bulk Send" feature, you can copy ALL of the text in the Debug Information section and email it to us. This will help us identify the problem or where Tube Toolbox is getting hung up. On the Sending Status screen, click on the "Options / Debug" Tab and copy all of the text from the Textbox, then email it to us.

This was a relatively minor update...

* When sharing videos or sending messages, if you are sending from more than 1 account, we now allow you to change the Send Delay down to 0 seconds. Since you are rotating between accounts, we allow you to reduce the time between messages.

* We have had a very rare issue that no one can duplicate where a message or share video got sent to the same person 5 times in a row. It is a strange glitch that we can't figure out but seems to have to do with Internet connectivity. We put something in place that should stop this from happening now by checking your Sent box before sending a message out. If Tube Toolbox see's the user in the first page of your Sent Box, it will skip the user and move to the next person. Please note that this adds an extra second or two with each send.

* We created a new Installation file for people who were having problems installing Tube Toolbox. It can be found here: http://www.TubeToolbox.com/Downloads/TubeToolboxSetup2.exe

* Tube Toolbox will now be displayed in the center of your screen when it starts up. We used to have it remember its last position but this caused issues with people running multiple monitors.

* We will probably start a monthly newsletter soon with Tips & Tricks  

Version 2.8.7.0 brings a much-anticipated feature: Syncronizing Subscribers

This feature will be exactly like Synchronizing Friends, Videos and Favorites which means that the first time you run Tube Toolbox on a computer, it will synchronize everything but then it's up to you to re-synchronize after that. This means that for most of you, you will have to maually synchronize them for the first time by clicking the "Synchronize Subscribers" link on the main Tube Toolbox screen under the Data group. 

New Features

*  Gmail Compatibility. You can now log in to Tube Toolbox with your gmail account. Note: If you are already using your YouTube username to log in, keep using your username. This is only for people who have YouTube accounts where you can ONLY log in with your gmail account.

* Ability to skip videos you have previously gathered. This feature already exists for gathering users so I added it for gathering videos as well. 

* Export to Text file & Sorting. Now in addition to CSV and XML format, you can export users or videos to a plain text file with 1 entry per line. You can also select if you want the list ordered by name or date gathered.

Bug Fixes

* Posting Comments to User Channels.  There were certain channels that did not accept comments but instead of handling it nicely, Tube Toolbox would put up an error message saying the comment was not acceptable. Now, it simply records it as "User does not accept comments" and moves on to the next person in the list.

* Gathering "My Subscribers". You can now go to http://www.YouTube.com/my_subscribers and gather ALL your subscribers.

* Data file change. This is something that you won't notice but cetain people using Vista were having problems because of this. Starting in this new version, your data file and log files will not longer be located at "c:\program files\sincell\tube toolbox\data" - they will be located at "c:\documents and settings\(your username)\application data\sincell\tube toolbox"

* Better handling o YouTube response messages to ensure accurate results during bulk sending.

Other

* I will be moving all Feature Requests from our forum to: http://TubeToolbox.Uservoice.com

I wanted to get some requested features in that people were asking for as well as fix a few bugs and finally, add additional logging that will help me deturmine problems quicker when YouTube breaks Tube Toolbox.

New Features

*  Ability to exclude main account from Message Sending. You can now skip your main account from the message rotation and only include your 'additional' accounts. This will help with the safety of your account if you're worried. You don't have anything to worry about anyway, but some people want to be extra super extremely semi-rediculous safe when it comes to making sure no one thinks anything bad about their account. This was not added to the 'Share Video' but if someone reads this and wants it, email me and I will add it to the next version.

* Maximum send delay increased from 5 minutes to 20 minutes [quick note, you may need to use the arrow keys and not just your mouse if you want to get detail down to selecting an exact 'second' with the sliders]

* Checks when YouTube is down for maintenance to make sure you don't accidentally send while YouTube is down and waste your sends.

* Progress Screens. When gathering or synchronizing your friends, you will now see a "please wait" screen instead of it just looking like the program froze.

* Sending History Export. You can export any search results to CSV or XML to do your own reporting and analysis on the data.

* Share Video Verification.  After 15 or 20 shared videos, YouTube makes it look like your videos are being shared but they actually aren't. They are tricking you. So, Tube Toolbox has added a feature that checks your Sent box after each send to make sure it actually got sent. If it doesn't show up, then it waits and tries again later until it actually went. This may make it seem like it's sending much slower than before, but now you can be sure that they are really getting sent.

Bug Fixes

* When you add a filter then remove it, the filter stayed. It will now be removed when you remove it!

* Fixed a few misspellings (do you really care?)

* Fixed some gathering options. Along these lines, if you have problems gathering from any particular page, send me a link to the page and a description of what is happening. Many of the pages need to be programmed separately. 

Other

* Added link to our software - GoDoubleVision.com where you can buy the center video per day or per week ($4.25). More information in the previous blog.

> I think that's all. Keep the suggestions coming and keep us posted if YouTube makes changes to their site which breaks Tube Toolbox. 

YouTube has put many restrictions over the past 2 years as far as the number of Messages, Share Video and Comments you can send in a given day. So it is more important than ever to make those sends count.

We have added a new feature which will allow you to filter users by the last time they logged in - to make sure this is a current user, or by the number of uploaded videos - to make sure you don't auto-subscribe to a channel with 0 videos, or by the number of Friends - so you can connect with 'popular' users. This feature has been added to Messenging, Share a Video, Subscribe to Channels and Send Comments to Users.