[Viki Community] New Moderator Roles Requirements

Well, this is all quite frustrating, I wonder how Viki made this simple decision.
A rule made in “theory”, without considering the “practice” or real scenarios.
It is not as simple as 1+1=2… there are so many options and it is not explained in
examples well.

I truly hope the community staff will read the different scenarios that can come into play, as so many concerned volunteers point out, not only in this thread but in other posts; wasn’t that even mentioned in feedback that you received, I wonder?

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There have been complains and issues with hoarding for years so at that point it’s good Viki finally does something. But it now also effects people who never hoarded anything…

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The drama with the drama…

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I just thought of something. This project you mention. Is it listed in your (https://contribute.viki.com/my-moderator-roles) as if all episodes are released?

Because, in essence, they are not, correct?

What about Page Designers that were only added to help with the cover pages and now we are involved negatively in the incomplete projects? :tired_face:

Sigh…

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@marykarmelina

Probably not because page designers get “all languages mod” so this position should not block any OL mod slot.

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Again and again new issue is coming. I tried to load the cover on my show, but it didn’t load correctly, so i remove it and try again, but it didn’t change. So i remove and refresh, still it says the cover is load even if there is nothing there. So I can’t add a new moderator ( even with zero mods ) now some other issues are starting to show. I hope they correct it soon.

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I like the structure of this section
image
There’s a quick link to the help center in case you have already completed projects, there’s a line stating how many eps out of the total eps have been released, and the number of completed eps is also shown. Y’all thought of everything. Thank you!

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Of course ^^ as all episodes were uploaded: 8/8 episodes released, 2 completed German moderator.
After all Viki needs a concept for - especially CMs - that refuse to do their job. Viki pampers them, but as stated previously there are quite a lot of projects that haven’t been fully released for a year (we are talking about less than 30 episodes in some cases) or where only one episode is released every few months. My friend’s project of 47 episodes was fully released after 11 months. I felt this is rather slow, but it can even be worse. Some CMs need to take responsibility for their projects in my opinion - they can adjust their English team, find more TEs, GEs or in the worst case substitute the CE. They can discuss releasing it to OL before a certain stage if there’re lots of obstacles.

But there is a lack of guidance in that aspect. You may receive some deadlines in some cases (e.g. Kdramas), but I’m mainly referring to Cdramas or Jdramas where audiences complain, but the CM is only told that they “can” adjust and edit stuff (but it’s not mandatory) and the rest… who cares?
So we had unedited projects on one hand and projects with near to no releases on the other hand. Furthermore, there are projects that are released at a fast pace, but there’re tons of obvious mistakes. Names change all the times, and some translations even make no sense at all. The other extreme isn’t the best outcome either.

Instead, this change again tries to put the evil OL moderators on a leash while no solution is provided for all the empty segments, slow releases and people shirking their responsibilities… and what about these never-ending variety shows? :woman_shrugging:

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There’s nothing black and white in the first place. People can be responsible or less responsible, no matter what position. I can sort of understand it might be difficult to find Translation Editors for languages such as Vietnamese, Thai or Cantonese where they tend to provide us with presubs that miss lots of segments or which are rather bad. They have some qualified paid translators, they can work on fixing these issues as well. :roll_eyes:

However, finding another GE or CE (or even TE in languages such as Chinese) is usually possible from my experience.

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I asked because I’m wondering how Viki knows when an episode is released and marks it in My Moderator Roles list as released. Completing English to >95% is not enough to say that the episode is released to OLs. An episode is released only when the CE says so. But there is no electronic way a CE marks it complete in Viki’s own electronic system. The information is given via emails and Team Discussion.

Also, there is a time difference between English and other languages. The episode will be available to the english team once the segments are locked by the CS. But the episode at that point is not released to OLs.

In your project(s) where the English is at 100% but the episodes are not released, how many are marked released Viki’s new system/list?

Well, that is just blasphemy! :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

Agreed. But then what is extremely important is good communication from the CM to their team, as well as proper teamwork. Team members can help the CM find volunteers. But they can only do that if the CM informs them which issue she has and if she allows others to help.

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Example:
Love in Flames of War
25/43 episodes released, 1 completed German moderator <- this is what’s in my profile

Currently there are 24 episodes available, episode 25 (mentioned above) will only be released today. Released for OL are 3 episodes. So as long as the episode appears somewhere as coming soon it probably will show up as released, I guess?

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So then Viki’s system bases the “release” entirely on video upload, not on actual release by the CE.

I find myself less impressed now by the My Moderator Roles list.

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Yes :frowning: I had a finished project which is now unfinished because apparently a special episode is coming sometime this week, but this show now shows 7/7 released and 6/7 completed in Dutch.

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What a way to find out about that…

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After reading so many opinions these days and complaining about the negative effects myself, I personally came to the following conclusions and felt the need to come back with a summary of them. So, Viki, can consider this long message as a public feedback from me:


1. WHICH PROJECTS SHOULD NOT BE COUNTED

The following projects should not be counted: those that are not licensed, those that are not released, those used exclusively to train new volunteers. There may be others, but I think these are the most common cases.

1.1. Unlicensed projects: Of course, we have the possibility to ask the channel manager or Viki to remove us from the role we have, since the project is no longer licensed and we can no longer access it. However, I personally would not want to lose that project from my project history, especially the moderator role. Right now, the only solution is to remain just editor or subber, but the project will be gone from my moderator history.

1.2. Unreleased projects: Of course, we’re not talking about the ones that are going to be released in a few days. Here we are talking about the ones that were supposed to be released, but kept getting postponed, now ending up in a situation where the postponement is for an indefinite period, even years. Maybe you should upload content only when you are sure it will be released soon, or not count it until it is released. It’s like me charging a fee for a service I didn’t provide. It is not fair.

1.3. Projects used to train new volunteers: Here we have the category of projects offered to NSSA academies and the category of projects used by languages without academies within NSSA. For the first category, projects can already be put on a white list so that they are not counted. For the second category, you need to come up with a quick and real solution. It is entirely your fault for not wanting to develop the NSSA further by adding new academies. The NSSA coordinators have not been active for some time, and so the creation of new academies is prevented. Maybe it is time to change or add new NSSA coordinators with the power to create new academies.

Question of the day for you, Viki: why are episodes counted when they are uploaded to Viki, and not when they are released to all languages? There is no point in uploading episodes and counting them, if we have to wait from 4 to 7 months, even 9 months, even up to more than a year, to be able to translate them into our language.


2. ENGLISH TEAMS AND CHANNEL MANAGERS

You need to take measures regarding English teams (certain editors), and certain channel managers. Here we have several issues:

2.1. From my experience so far, I could observe that seggers teams, as well as English subbers, do not present problems in completing their work in a reasonable time in the project, in their vast majority. So we are somewhat ok with them.

2.2. However, the big problem comes when the English subbers finish their work, and the English editing team has to continue. I don’t think it is worth mentioning again all the cases presented these days, where some editors have gone way overboard with the time allocated to editing projects. Also, I think you have been receiving complaints on this issue over the years. So, what do we do about the English language editorial teams? There aren’t many, so we need to keep and encourage the current ones, but we also need to find the right measures so that they don’t hinder the release of projects into all languages unnecessarily.

2.3. Irresponsible channel managers: Here we are talking about those who accept without any problem that their editorial teams are working at a infernally slow pace compared to the size of the project. Why don’t channel managers have the courage to impose a certain pace of work? Why don’t channel managers take the decision to change some editors when there are complaints about the very slow pace of episode releases? Should we have a more detailed guide for channel managers? Should we increase the importance of the channel manager role? Maybe then there won’t be people who disregard this role, and will follow the channel manager’s guidelines for the project.


3. ABANDONING PROJECTS

Temporary moderators - I think that’s what we’ll call the category of people who will take on projects, start them, but abandon them as soon as new ones are released. So you definitely should not let these moderators out of your attention. There are two approaches here.

3.1. Sanctioning at a certain number of abandoned projects, with a ban on moderating for a certain period. Of course, after analysing the reasons for abandoning a project.

3.2. Or, as someone said in another topic, you could create tiers of rewards for moderators who complete each moderated project. Rewards can be of many kinds: special badges, special statuses, maybe even an extra slot as long as there is no unjustified withdrawal in the moderator’s history, etc. Of course, this does not assume that projects will be completed with a decent quality. As it hasn’t happened so far, quality is not an important issue for you.


4. QUALITY ON NATIVE LANGUAGE - SLOWLY DYING, AND YOU STILL DON’T GIVE AN ANSWER ON THIS!!!

As stated since the first reply to this topic, I do not agree with the CURRENT FORM of these requirements. So, to some extent I understand the need to have a limit. However, these new requirements TOTALLY EXCLUDE quality. What can you do about this? Well, you can do this:

4.1. Introduce mandatory graduation from the NSSA subbing academy. Of course, for languages without an academy you will have to get to work and create academies for them. Obviously, this will not guarantee full responsibility from moderators, but it will be a big step towards better quality.

4.2. It is more complex and probably more expensive, but introducing native staff for each language could be another solution. The fact that someone speaks and/or writes English very well can in no way guarantee that that person has an almost flawless knowledge of the native language.


5. IF YOU ARE CONSIDERING REVISING THESE REQUIREMENTS

What I think you should consider in case of changes to these requirements:

5.1. Quality - Any changes you want to make should be based on quality in the native language.

5.2. Time per volunteer - Not all volunteers can spend the same amount of time working on Viki. Why not give a little extra chance to those who can be more active, to actually be more active.

5.3. Pace of rolling out projects to other languages - I have already said all I need to on this subject.


6. MY CONCLUSIONS

After more than a year of being on Viki, I can say without hesitation that the direction of Viki is more financially and commercially oriented, rather than a solid and responsible community.

Native language quality is not important to you. Although it is already quite clear that the majority of responsible volunteers repeatedly draw your attention to this.

You take almost no notice of the feedback we give you. For God’s sake, it’s 2022 and we have to use that Inbox? No real time sending/receiving, no quick search, no conversation categorization function, no ability to delete/add members from/in a conversation, no ability to send pictures and videos, no phone app, plus much more.

However, the fact that recently some of your staff decided to join the Discord server created and maintained by this wonderful community, gives me a little more hope that maybe you will change your approach towards us. Hopefully we won’t have to wait years… Also, let’s hope that the reason for joining is not entirely different, in a negative sense.


Sorry for this long post, and maybe repetitive on some aspects, but I felt the need to do it. :sweat_smile::see_no_evil::slightly_smiling_face:

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You should definitely send this to the Viki people. If I worked for viki I would hire you on the spot. All the point made in your post should have been considered by the viki people before making any upgrades.

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Finding English editors is not always that easy. As a moderator I experienced it several times, that a TE was added belated to the team and as a CM I had problems finding one, too. Not just once. Sometimes you have to look around, to ask lots of people, just to find one, who maybe doesn’t have that much time. I once ended up with 3 TEs and 2-3 GEs and the releases were coming slowly, because of the lack of time. So, I don’t want to offend anyone, but it’s sometimes quite difficult to find someone for these positions. It’s easy to blame the CM, but what should we do? We are all volunteers, we can’t force people to work, we can’t bribe them (just kidding) and we can’t “bake” us a TE. What should a CM do with a very big team of English subtitlers, but almost no one has time and the subtitles are done very slowly? It’s easy to say, you should replace them, when you already asked 60-70 people. I managed dramas with tons of subtitlers and was desperate because of the slow results. But I also managed dramas with few subtilers and the subtitles were done over night, very fast working editors and releases within 24 hours.

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I already mentioned that the TE position might be an exception. Usually, they don’t approach you either. Anyway, the dramas mentioned are not released slowly because of missing a TE in the first place. Out of the dramas I participated in since 2020 about 13 out of ~80 progressed slowly. A minority suffered from slow Translation Edit. Still, it might be an issue with historical or “boring” dramas. But there’s a drama where the CE requires 3-14 days to release an episode after GE. Without even changing anything. Maybe the TE and GE are geniuses… maybe the CE is an existence to delay the progress here. Who knows.

That hasn’t been an issue since they introduced paid translators, I guess.

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Oh, that’s wonderful! Just like the segmenting course. I had no idea. I wonder why we don’t have the same in other language subbing academies.

Yes, now I see how this can be a problem for you, then. A creative solution is needed.

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