YouTube views badge returns invalid

[dohyeon5626]

Are you experiencing an issue with...

shields.io

🐞 Description

youtube video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ILDesSpFls
url : https://img.shields.io/youtube/views/1ILDesSpFls

The YouTube views badge appears to be broken.
Instead of displaying the view count, it always returns invalid.

🔗 Link to the badge

https://img.shields.io/youtube/views/1ILDesSpFls

💡 Possible Solution

No response

[dohyeon5626]

I tested it, and it works as expected now. Thanks for the quick fix! I'll close this issue.

[PyvesB]

Hello @services 👋🏻 Thanks for reporting, there is indeed an issue. YouTube essentially revoked our API quota on August 3rd and communicated pretty poorly about it.

On June 1st, an automated mail was sent to team@shields.io, our primary contact mail registered with the YouTube team. We were asked to complete an audit of our Shields.io YouTube badges with a 14 days deadline. This came as a surprise given that the previous audit had been completed only 18 months ago, that our usage of the API has stayed well below quota limits since then, and that our implementation (which YouTube was provided the direct link to on previous occasions) has virtually not changed. Goes without saying, imposing a 14 day deadline (reduced from 30 days during previous audits) for an open source project run by volunteers in their spare time is pretty unreasonable.

The deadline passed without us hearing from them again and our badges were still working, so given previous context I just assumed the mail had been sent in error. This wouldn't be the first time that they make mistakes with their audit process.

Turns out they had sent 5 other mails to our Gmail account, which the maintainer team rarely ever opens up. They essentially ignored the primary contact we had registered with their team for all but one email. I discovered this today.

The audit process was pretty tedious and random on previous occasions (see #6304, #10570, #8605, and others), and the submission form has again gotten even more complicated and awkward since last time I had to fill it out. I went ahead and spent a good half an hour on this. However, if they don't refresh the token soon or if they invent new violations with the Shields.io implementation, I'll go ahead and retire these badges. It's not reasonable for me to keep on putting so much effort with so little goodwill on their part.

[PyvesB]

In light of the mail inconsistencies mentioned in my previous message, I checked our Gmail account every day this week to see if we got any news following the submission form: nothing. I discovered today that they changed things again and went back to using team@shields.io, without acknowledging the mixup or warning us of the switch. That's another week that went by with broken badges.

The YouTube team has reached a new level of absurdity in their requests: they're demanding a video recording with live commentary in English in order to move forward with the audit process. Given the screenshots I provided, the direct links to the YouTube badges in our UI, the direct link to the code of the badges, the simplicity of our implementation, and all the context that was provided in previous recent audits, it's a mystery to me why they're asking for more. I've obviously pushed back, but did offer to author these video screencasts if they were willing to compensate us for this work.

I'm giving things another week for our token to be reinstated. If nothing moves by then, I'll go ahead and retire our YouTube badges.