Thank you, Mirjam, for bringing up this topic.
If Viki doesn’t listen to us, I hope it at least informs CMs about this issue.
Often when I’m recruited for a CS position I’m faced with this message, and every time I try my best to explain to the CM how segmenters work, how we are now perfectly capable of combining or splitting without any subtitle in any language getting lost. But as you mentioned not all CM dare to go agaist Viki or even ask their permissiom to proceed with A&C, that in the end is always granted.
This message is outdated, it only creates confusion and reduces the timing quality of those shows that end up being adjust only, for no good reason.
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Yes, they could substitute it with
“If combining is needed, make sure that you have saved OL subtitles and replace them exactly as they were into the newly made segment”.
Easy peasy.
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Well said, Mirjam 
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By the time that I became seriously active as a segmenter, A&C (E+P) had already become so normal that, apart from the one unsubbed show I was in, I don’t even know anything else. No CS has ever told me I could only adjust and by now, I see no reason for that request anymore. My first CSs just explained the process of A&C (E+P) to me and ever since, I know what to do.
Therefore, I think it is very strange that Viki still tells CMs that combining segments will lead to deletion of subtitles. Of course, it would… if we were careless. But those who came before me put serious effort into developing methods to avoid the loss of subtitles without compromising the results. Did they do that for nothing?
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I wholeheartedly agree. By now, there is no reason left to keep telling CMs that combining is not an option. If Viki really wants the best for their viewers, they should start putting some trust in the segmenting community and not create obstacles for us by giving the CMs outdated information. We know perfectly well how to handle multisubbed shows. All we need now is for Viki to believe in us and let us do our job.
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I hope they change the message because as stated above we know how to work with more than one language and there are many of us that don’t work on adjust only shows. I don’t as a segger and/or CS, it’s depressing to leave a segment that would have been great combined or split. So please viki change the message so new CMs understand that they can trust the person they have chosen as a CS.
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I am currently CS at a BL. When I asked the CM whether Viki had made certain specifications, I received the following message as a screen:
One important note to your CS: please do not combine any segments during the A&Cs as this will result in the PT subs being deleted in the process. And if that happens, we will have to reimport all subs (EN & PT), which will erase all the hard work from the team, and that’s something we want to avoid. But if you are already familiar with preserving both the subtitles, you can go ahead with the A&C.
Apparently there are different messages for different CMs.
I received this information before this post was written from Mijam.
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I have never seen the last line before. I guess it’s an improvement, but they’d better just say, “Make sure that your CS knows how to handle A&C on multisubbed shows” and leave out the “please do not combine” part.
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Must be a new version then, for “Put your head on my shoulder” I received the old message as well. 
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Yes, that is an annoying canned message. A live ‘person’ is not sending that out. It is automatically appended to the “Congratulations - you got the show” message.
Rather than posting here, The person to write to is @brendas asking for that portion of the message to be removed. Brendas has no control over it. All she can do is pass our request up the ladder.
The original case was that when Viki first dropped shows in 2 to 4 languages it was a disaster! Most CMs were not backing up the episodes so the CSs took that task on.
Many CMs are newbies who don’t know who is who, so that message is directed to them so subs are not lost. Most experienced CSs just ignore that message anyway. The CSs know who the trained segmenters are.
And for newbie CMs who hire people like me, I tell them flat out WHY we will not do ‘paste only’. Once the CMs are educated, we do the segmenting correctly. and for those who fear Viki the ‘boss’ I send them to ask fsl viki for approval, He knows me so all is good.
There was ONE CM who feared “the Viki message” and demanded paste only. I declined that job. I am not sure which poor CS took that thankless job on. I won’t do it because the subtitles pasted across multiple segments are a MESS on the backend. I won’t do that to the Subbers.
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Not allowing merging of segments creates massive problems for OLs, so I would like to give that viewpoint now.
If there is a single thing different between two neighboring (doubled) subs, it is noticeable as a tw-itch. Reason being that all subs are centralized on screen. So the center shifts easily with any change.
A single mistake can be:
- an extra space
- a space on the wrong side of the line break
- a missing full-stop
- a typo which was corrected in one segment, but not in the other.
I’ve only subbed a couple of projects like that and had to copy-paste the same sub once during subbing and the second time during editing, because I was not sure I could detect the error visually, by eye.
It was tedious to translate, took longer AND I still noticed errors here and there while watching 
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And because of such cases, we need Viki to stop telling CMs that segmenters can’t combine.
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Hence the word “default”…
Then what’s the point? Someone already made a request and what are the results?
And Viki brought that on themselves by suddenly dropping those extra presubs on us without any instructions. Segmenters thought, “it’s not my task.” OL Mods thought, “I’ll do it when I get there.”
But that’s all in the past. And now we are stuck with that misleading message that is obstructing our work.
That is exactly the problem. New or not, the last thing Viki needs is a CM who believes that combining segments is not an option.
As in, they combine behind the CM’s back? That could lead to serious trouble…
We all do that because Viki forces us to. We shouldn’t have to.
And some CMs wouldn’t even do that.
So Viki misleading the CM made you lose a potential job.
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There are sadly many stories where people have lost jobs because they refuse to do adjust only.
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I have more than enough work as it is. I am sad that the show is not done correctly but I won’t be a part of bad segmenting.
The problem has been here ever since they started dropping extra languages.
I do point out certain things to @brendas who passes it up the system. But some ‘official’ who is NOT a segmenter makes the decisions on what the default message contains. They only care about what the public sees and when the public complains that subs are missing THAT affects Viki’s bottom line. So we have to deal with it. It is a corporate decision.
Hi everyone - we appreciate everyone’s input on the segmenting message being sent to CMs and apologize for the confusion this has caused. I’ve funneled this up to the appropriate team. Moving forward, they will adjust the message per @mirjam_465 suggestion by removing the “please do not combine” part and saying instead “making sure your CS knows how to handle A&C on multisubbed shows.” Thank you again for helping us remedy this! 
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Thank you, Brenda. That is great news. 
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Can you believe that even now, some CSs forbid their entire team of segmenters to properly do their job and force them to do adjust-only as a condition for joining their team? I think we can safely say that by now, the majority of seggers is familiar with multisubs and the few who aren’t can still learn.
So what moves these CSs?
- Lack of faith in the abilities of their segmenters?
- Wanting to do it all themselves?
In both cases, the question rises: why don’t they just QC on their own, without hiring a team? Yes, I know that adjust-only nowadays gets us contribution points, as well. So what? Is that what we went through the academy for? Are we supposed to waste all our skills like that? I thought we had finally said goodbye to this practice. No respectable CS should promote it, let alone force it upon advanced segmenters.
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Actually, you will lose about half of them if the CS combines all the segments you adjusted.
In any case, it’s not of this age anymore. The CSs you are talking about must be very old-fashioned. I wouldn’t waste my time on it.
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I teach Adjust only (Level 2) but let’s be honest I would never join a show as a segger or CS if I couldn’t do my work properly. I think it’s sad if there are CS that ask their teams not to do a proper job, I remember when A-only came, it felt depressing leaving something half done.
I just want to say that I think it’s smart that we have adjust only in NSSA as it teaches timing, but also that the later levels have multiple language A&C as that’s closer to what I think being a segger is all about (combining/splitting and adjusting).
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