I’m writing this post with the expectation that everyone else was doing things the right way already, but maybe not because they’d never thought about doing what I was trying to do. Yeah, clear as mud, but don’t worry because you know I’m about to explain things.

When I loaded my first video back in January, I came into things with some rules for what I didn’t want to see. I didn’t want to see any negative comments on my YouTube channel. I didn’t want a lot of nonsense in any fashion. I didn’t see myself putting any advertising into the video unless I was going to do a review. And I wanted control over who would see my videos.

So, when I uploaded my videos to YouTube, I changed the setting to “unpublished”, which meant people could only find the videos if I basically sent them the link, or if I embedded the video somewhere. In my mind, that was the best way to go and still have control over everything.

And it worked; kind of. I had control, but not total control. What was lacking?

It seems that even though one has an account, if you select unpublished you can only find one video at a time. And I don’t only mean visitors, I mean the account holder as well. I’d been wondering why I could only see one video even though I’d uploaded 5 videos; actually, I wondered after the 3rd video but I kept questioning myself on it. Finally with this one I just had to solve the issue.

The issue was with “unpublished”. It seems that if you select that one you’re also saying you don’t want visitors that see that particular video, whether they see it elsewhere or decide to pop over to YouTube, to see anything else you might have produced. It doesn’t even tell people you’ve got another video up.

Well, that wasn’t quite control, was it? So I went in and took a look at all the settings. I found two things. One, publishing so any visitor can see all the videos available was the main option, and thus it’s probably what everyone else already knew. Two, there’s a secondary option which allows you to denote how you want to handle comments. I decided that I would moderate comments; therefore, no comments will show up on YouTube on any videos without being approved.

Yeah, I know, I talk about moderation on blogs all the time so what gives? The difference is that if a comment is over the line on the blog I’ll know about it almost immediately and can go in and remove it if I have to; luckily, I haven’t had to so far. On my YouTube page, nasty stuff could be there for a long time before I saw it; I decided I just wasn’t having that.

I won’t over-censor there though. Since I don’t expect very many people to find anything I’ve got there unless they know me I shouldn’t have many visitors; I can’t figure out what someone would put into a search engine to find it, since it’s not under “Mitch Mitchell”, which is also odd since, if you remember back in January, I said I never even knew I had a YouTube account to begin with. But it eliminates any confusion with the more famous Mitch Mitchell, so that’s good.

Anyway, if you happen to be someone that did what I did and went through what I went through, now you know why you can’t find your other videos. If not, well, you can laugh at me for trying to control everything, but now I am controlling everything; Muah-ha-ha-ha-ha! 🙂

Oh, while I’m talking about YouTube, I shared this video on Facebook about a month ago, and my wife is still laughing about it. And if I got her laughing, then you’ll enjoy it as well; poor dog: