I’m bringing this up here because I want to know what you guys think about what is happening lately on Viki. I’m on the platform for about 3 years, so maybe the older users already saw something like this happening before, but this is a first for me.
For the past few months I’ve been getting messages from new accounts (under 1000 contributions, sometimes zero and created very recently) asking to be mod for Hindi, Spanish, Japanese, Indonesian… the thing is, the same person asked for more than three languages. This person, which I believe many of you already had contact with, is making many different accounts. Viki shuts the account down, deletes the bad subs and the person reappears with a new name, new gender, and the same toxic personality.
I’ve had messages from him/her/it that went from “I’m your fan” to “Just kill yourself”. Is very tiring to have to deal with this annoying person and, because of this, I now can’t trust rookies.
Viki knows about it, I have already contacted them, but they can only see one report at a time. And how can we be sure if the person is really honest when contacting us?
So, unfortunately, because of one bad apple, I can’t trust any other apple in the basket. When a rookie asks me to sub/mod in a language I have no way to see if it’s Google Translator or not, I ask for the person to contact an older Viki contributor of the same language and ask for the person to vouch for her/him/it.
I know this is unfair to the rookies that are honest and just want to help, but I don’t want to go through the trouble of having viewers complain about shitty subs and having Viki staff contact me to remove the person.
Hello! I’m padma
My language is telugu, I’m contributing for viki for less than a year,
If you get any messages from my language subbers, you can always contact me and I can tell you the quality of their translation and whether they are using Google translator or not.
For this reason I have been rejected to join in teams for several months,and there are none to guide me either. but now I gained enough trust, I’m grateful to those who trusted me as a rookie, as humans it’s quite common to trust people easily.
Hwaiting 
There is a fairly simple solution, but requires Viki’s own IT department.
Every computer has a unique and permanent marking called MAC address (nothing to do Apple Macintosh). MAC address is visible when one makes a Viki account, no matter the e-mail address they give.
The IT depratment can block individual MAC addresses from creating new Viki Accounts.
A person can use several computers for this misdeed. In which case each computer must be blocked separately and there is no elegant solution.
And now, on a more personal note…
That is actually scary! How dare they?? I’m so sorry you have to go through this… I’m now both angry and want to give you a big hug.
Also, I don’t understand what one gets from writing false subs in several languages when they never reach the gold QC level. Some sort of auto-masochism? Idiots!
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.
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.
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.
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.
That’s also against Viki guidelines, that say you have to be a QC to be made moderator.
A Qc trainee can also be a mod for one project it’s here check out.
https://support.viki.com/hc/en-us/articles/204484740-What-is-a-Moderator-and-what-do-they-do-
There’s already a discussion on how many projects one can take as a moderator 
But the person in question here is not even a QC Trainee. They have made only 383 + 254 = 637 contributions. They were appointed mod position when they had 0 subs. Here, it’s the CM who failed in following Viki guidelines. I wouldn’t blame this volunteer because they might not know how we work or what is the role/importance of each position.
I agree. Or even ask for some ID to register. Anyway, something that can identify the person as one and only.
Thank you <3 The messages were all bipolar and ginormous. It started with “I hate you all” (group message) and “I’ll kill myself and is your fault” to “you should just kill yourself” and it ended with lots of smiling faces, flowers, hearts, and kisses. I was like O.o.
To me looks like the person just wants to get to do a lot of things at once. It even had one profile to mess the segments of a project that was already fully edited and released to other languages.
For what I’ve read it looks like is the same person.
They all claim to be native, to speak the language since they were a child, etc. They were born on Google Translator Land.
I’ve worked on a daycare once, it is pretty much the same. They ask, I say no and then I get a lot of hate messages and threats of reporting me to Viki. When the person is legit wanting to help, they understand and say they’ll come back after contacting an older viki contributor.
Now I have a few names that I can suggest when the person don’t know anyone ^^
Maybe viki could do some sponsor/ninja academy for subbers and moderators too and we could only accept the once that graduate.
One of the many accounts had zero subs and was added as mod for 5 projects in 3 different languages.
Zero subs and 5 moderations in 3 different languages.
They had zero subs when they were added as mod.
Exactly! If the languages are fairly unknown to viki, a few cm (especially the rookies) simply add as mod and this is it.
Maybe we should make a list of long-term moderators who are willing to check subs of very young and fresh contributors for CMs. I know I’ve done it plenty of times. My native language is Croatian, but due to the similarity of languages, I can also recognise the misuse of Serbian, Serbo-Croatian, Bosnian, Montenegrin and Slovenian language. Well, also Norwegian to some extent.
Also, if you know who the CM in question was who gave a volunteer with zero contributions a Moderator position, I would report that CM to Viki. Not to be mean, but more so that Viki can be the one to explain how things work here. And also for Viki to understand they themselves might have made a mistake to appoint a not well-experienced CM without explaining things beforehand. After all, it all started with their decision to appoint that CM.
I’d be happy to check on Dutch subtitles 
Honestly I almost fell for it too and I say almost because thankfully I went to older moderators and asked them their thoughts on the user’s message and situation. It’s hard trusting rookie’s, not only because of this person, but overall. I almost added someone as a subber the other day because I saw they worked with a mod that I know and they had an old account, but when I checked their subs and saw it was GT, I contacted the mod to ask about them and the mod said they had to remove this person because they were causing trouble and breaking the rules. As a mod, I want to give rookies a chance to be a part of this community, but, as you said, because of one bad apple, I can’t trust the other apples in the basket. I had my fist CM in a drama recently, but I only added people that were active for a long time and had a lot of contributions. I checked every profile and projects they made. It’s the reasonable thing to do as CM. You can’t give newly made accounts with 0 contributions important roles in a project, that’s just not playing smart at all.
Also, I saw this in other projects, but how can you add a subber in a language you don’t understand if you don’t have a mod for the language? People volunteered to be a subber for various different languages in the drama I’m a CM, but I didn’t add anyone, because how can I trust this person is doing a good job if I don’t know the language and there isn’t a moderator to check in on them?
Unfortunately, you can’t even 100% trust the accounts with over 100.000 contributions. I know one in particular where initially the contributor barely spoke any English and was dependent on our subs to watch series. Just to suddenly start “subbing” herself. Needless to say, her translations are often barely coherent. We are guessing she’s using GT and then modifying subs to make them sound a bit more logical. But the result is just an awful translation.
It turns to be a vicious cycle then. I guess the quickest solution would be what you suggested.
Maybe we should make a list of long-term moderators who are willing to check subs of very young and fresh contributors for CMs.
I just recently became a CM and a Mod, after almost six years subbing, even after all that time in this community I still felt a bit scared and nervous of doing something wrong in this new positions, but honestly I have a clear mind now because an older moderator helped me a lot and gave me lots of advice. If we do something like what you suggest or, maybe, do a moderator/channel manager masterclass type of thing, I think it would decrease a lot of the issues that we are having right now with trusting rookies and even users hoarding projects, because CM’s would trust other people other than the older and well known ones. It would give more people a chance to grow in here. Well, at least that’s what I hope haha.
How exciting. Don’t think I’ll ever take a CM role, but it’s nice to see how newer CMs are trying to do their best 
. A bummer that you have to deal with these type of things.