hey mikey_2d2N:

No! I am not using TTB @ all right now and I didnt even sign into it when i saw it was asking for my google plus account info to sign into TTB! That was a HUGE RED FLAG FOR ME and I decided not to use it at all while I start my channel over from scratch! Its just too much work to build a chnl and then to lose it all overnight ...

I REFUSE TO USE TTB UNTIL I HEAR FROM TTB THAT IT IS SAFE TO USE & I GET MY MAIN CHNL BACK! AND BELIEVE ME I AM SOOOOOOO TEMPTED TO JUST CRANK UP THE PACE ON MY NEW CHNL RIGHT ABOUT NOW!!! :)

TTB admin have even said that they are not certain what is going on with their software and YT until they hear back from YT ~ soooooo, I am not using it yet!~

Thats just my personal decision based upon the information i have gathered over the past month ...

tm~

ttchuck im expecting an update from you on the 15th, if you dont get responce from youtube, i surely hope you dont plan to send another email and expect us to wait around 3 weeks again, i hope you escalate this, ima start to search for youtube managers contact details myself

You could always just be manipulative like every other group. Instead of titling the group about TTB, or spamming, or marketing, call it something noble like "Youtube Content Creator Promotion and Marketing" or something. Then in your description, describe 'bad' spammers and boldly state that you hate them and that the group is not for them, and in doing so, you give the subliminal impression that we are 'good' spammers. (well, we are, after all). Just a thought.

This has been a wild ride for TTB users and I'm wary of what is safe and not safe at this time. I'm setting up the 1 wk. trial version and have a question for anybody that's not shy about answering it. I'm thinking about doing the "gathering users" from a drone acct. Is there any known situation where a TTB has had YT close their acct. because of the gathering users feature in TTB?

After gathering users I was considering doing "contact add" requests from my main account. I'm also thinking that if that's not safe then I could manually send out far fewer contact requests through the main acct. I don't know what makes the most sense right now. Has anyone heard of a TTB user getting their acct. banned when all they were sending out was contact add requests and nothing else? Are contact add request any safer than the other things you can send out with TTB?

Monkey - Thanks for the reply. Yes, you can add contacts manually from your Inbox at YT. Click on Address Book > click on the Add New button > paste some YT acct. username into the field that appears in the dialog box > click on the Save button. The new Contact request is instantly sent. Since YT "Contacts" are now officially a part of Google contacts there is no known limit to how many you can have and, apparently, how many request you can send out. This is stated at the top of your YT Inbox screen image: "Your email contacts are now in the Google Contacts Manager. View Email Contacts (hyperlink)".

The reason that I'm guessing Contacts is safer is because there is no "report spam" link attached to them when the recipient receives them. You have pointed out that sometimes you get reply messages as a result of sending them. But, I think your decision to ignore them is good business in this case.

Although it's probably much harder to isolate and nail down, does anybody know of a situation where YT pulled the plug on a TTB user for using a bot only to gather users? Thanks!

I read about the theoretically unlimited number thing in an article I came across on the Internet from last year where a YT employee was answering a question about it. Wish I had bookmarked it now. I've did some more searching and the best I've been able to come up with is a help article from Google stating the number of contacts has a quota of 25,000. Here's the URL for that:

http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=148779

That article is current in the help section at Google, but it's from last year, too. With all the anti-spam strategies by YT in 2012 the limit might have changed since then. There seems to be differing opinions about it on the Internet.

I'm guessing that since the Contacts data can supposedly be exported to a data file, then I could first just store them externally in such a data file separate from my YT Inbox, and secondly delete them from my YT Inbox to create available space to keep adding new ones. If possible, hopefully that wouldn't raise any red flags with YT/Google. Do you think that strategy would probably blow up before it even got off the launch pad or might it work?

TrackMaker - Thanks for your input. I've been reading the posts in the TTB Forum now for about a week. I'll probably read most all of the content. I agree with you. You're absolutely right. Any tool, process, script, etc. that runs automated on YT/Google is pushing the envelope with the T.O.S. and obviously TTB is no exception to the rules. What seems interesting to me is the selective enforcement of the rules. They take down some users and ignore others. Since YT/Google plays their cards very close to their chest it's likely got TTB trying to analyze the latest changes rather than have the same directly communicated to them. I can understand a reluctance to say too much. From the perspective of YT/Google's network security department, I would presume, they probably don't want to tell outsiders what specific things they are doing now to protect their own interests. The bottom line has to be YT/Google's T.O.S. itself. If a bot touches an account under your control they reserve the right, at their discretion, to take it down and ban you or at least sanction your I.P. Address anyway. So, to use TTB or any bot is to assume that risk. You can believe that you have it all figured out and then forge ahead to either a gain or the loss of your important work. The adage "no risk, no gain" seems to sum it up.

I think I can see the advantage of a proxy arrangement to protect your actual I.P. Address. Some of the services I've looked into so far allow you to rotate between different I.P. Addresses similar to the rotation of text messages sent out in TTB. If the TTB program supports that, it might be helpful. Drone accounts with appropriate content seem useful, too. But the biggest problem appears to be actually getting response traffic to your main account without touching it with a bot. Some kind of forwarding/relay process to facilitate that (my own unrealistic pipe dream) would be akin to finding a pirate's buried treasure chest in the bot world. I've been on YT for a few years and have some established accounts there. I'll do some of my own QA type testing before jumping in the deep end with both feet on this. Thanks again, TrackMaker. I appreciate your advice.

The only result I've been able to produce so far with various attempts at using a proxy to access YT is a dysfunctional result. The graphical images on the YT page fail to load correctly and I get a red banner message from YT on the page that reads something to the effect of "It appears that you have JavaScript disabled". I don't. YT is just getting a lot sneakier these days in figuring out what is coming at them and how to respond to it. I've only tried using proxy web sites and working with a single Windows PC. I've not tried using another node such as a server/router with a different machine access code address between my main PC and the Internet access provider.

Just for an insight on share video... I noticed that I didn't say what my delays were and I'm not even sure what their recommendation is. But for the past 2 weeks, I've been running share video nearly 24/7 with time delay on 15s-15s and auto retry times from 30m 5s-30m 15s. None of the drones have been banned. I also get about 2400 sent out per day, using 4 drones. Hope this helps

I've been testing with one instance - 4 drones. I used default settings and I only changed the auto retry to Min- 29 mins 50 secs Max- 30mins 0 secs. Everything was going fine for almost two weeks and then they were all banned one day. I target users to send to in my niche and I guess they flagged the message "mark as spam" too much. So now I am testing out more settings and seeing what works.