Giving a chance to a rookie x Falling for fake accounts

[shraddhasingh]

@cerejacult

For the past few months I’ve been getting messages from new accounts (under 1000 contributions, sometimes zero and created very recently)

I guess I know who you’re talking about. If I am correct, I guess I’ve seen almost 7 accounts by the same person, just differing in an underscore or a number in their username.

I believe Xylune was the first person to bring up this issue.

@xylune

Lately, I’ve reported someone for translating in a language they obviously didn’t know (and Viki removed them after we collected some evidence). However, that person returned and just continued under the very same name with partly the same projects in another language (I’m unable to verify since I don’t know it). Still, such person runs around again now claiming they can translate into Portuguese, Dutch, Catalan, Indonesian, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish… Of course.

In a different case, I’m doubtful that the translator understands German or English very well (it’s difficult to determine, but they simply don’t seem to understand some things) and they became very unreliable (meeting one out of 5 deadlines in various cases without explanation, no improvement, nothing). Instead, the person started taking a bunch of moderator projects (and did nothing in one of them for a while). Maybe no one was surprised why they got removed from 7-8 series, but as a CM I’d probably be surprised.

I have no experience as a CM but whatever I’ve learned as a moderator, I can’t trust or I find it difficult to trust newbies/rookies. The very first thing I do when I receive an application from someone is to check their credibility and their skills. In the beginning, I used to fall for such people, too. Speakers of different Indian languages would claim they are natives or they know Hindi and would want to work but their “native-ity” showed just after doing some 40-50 subs.

@cerejacult

I’ve had messages from him/her/it that went from “I’m your fan” to “Just ■■■■ yourself”. Is very tiring to have to deal with this annoying person and, because of this, I now can’t trust rookies.

I am very sorry to hear this. I really dislike when people like them overpower our work and viewers who deeply appreciate our work. It makes me feel that we’re doing this for free but receive negativity in return.

@cerejacult

And how can we be sure if the person is really honest when contacting us?

A lot of CMs have contacted me for opinions on subbers with 0 or less than 1,000 subtitles. You can do the same; simply reply them with, “Since you’ve almost no experience in language X, I recommend you to gain some experience as a subber under someone’s guidance before working independently. You may contact moderator Y for some guidance.” And you can contact moderator Y informing about the subtitler and check for their credibility.

I guess Viki is busy with helping their viewers that they forgot they’ve a community working in the background. They’ll take their time with such people and do what’s best for their company. For now, I can only say that rookies shouldn’t work independently rather under someone’s guidance.

Of course, I also fail to understand why some CMs allow people with almost no experience (0 contributions) to work as a moderator. As you can see in this screenshot,

The CM made this volunteer a mod with 0 subtitles and it’s been more than a week since their last activity. I wouldn’t blame the volunteer here but the CM for having poor judgement of giving mod position to this volunteer with 0 subs.