[Viki Community] New restrictions for assigned languages

Why are you all thanking viki personnel for fixing a problem which did not exist until they instituted an obviously not well thought out change? Obviously brenda is not a tech person who caused the problem - but she communicated the problem to the techs who caused the problem so she should be thanked but no one on the viki tech staff deserves thanks. In the very distant past, some of us were asked about how the segging and subbing functions could be improved, were told in advance about proposed changes and then were asked to beta test it. Now the techs have these “bright”(yeah, right) ideas and then implement them and then have to fix the problems they didn’t foresee.
Problem: Poor segmenting – Who is doing the segmenting of the raw videos now? Viki staff.
Whose idea was it to allow any viki paid subber to segment without any idea about the principles of good segmenting? Viki staff
Whose idea was it to pre-sub in multiple languages so that if a segment needed to split or merged, multiple languages would have to be preserved? viki staff
An old engingeering saying: “If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it.”

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What a chaos, what is wrong with Viki as company? On one hand they want volunteers to work, today even faster than before, on the other hand they are replacing and restricting them. I’m somewhat saddened at what I’m seeing every few months another restriction
 :thinking::face_with_diagonal_mouth: :disappointed_relieved:

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I suppose they were just following orders and probably under a lot of pressure to implement the changes ASAP.
I agree that Viki has a tendency to act before they think, but we can’t randomly blame individual workers who are just cogs in the wheel. And they did solve the issue within 24 hours.

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A new “V-dance”? Hmmm
Why not communicate with a small focus/feedback group first, beta test it, then implement the launch? I’m sure there are tons of willing, competent and smart contributors in the Contributor Fam who’d gladly help. Particularly the very active ones who labor with lots of love and competency, day in and day out.

Be that as it may, please continue to make contributing easier and more fulfilling for contributors.
:muscle: :muscle: :muscle:

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Somehow, I initially read “Farm.” :woman_farmer:t3: :rofl:

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Thank you @brendas!

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I don’t understand, if I work as a sub and moderator of Spanish and Thai will I have problems to change language? :upside_down_face:

Not anymore. :slight_smile:

At one point this could be a good idea against people abusing the system and want to ruin our subs but this is a bad idea when you are part of a segmenting team and Viki wants us to back up all the presubbed languages before we start segmenting in case we cut and change segments where needed so some subs in languages are getting lost.
Yesterday as a chief segmenter for “What Comes After Love” I did back up the languages and this where the steps I had to take to back up 4 languages:
-Get into the segment timer of episode 4 and unlock the episode so we get access to the subtitle editor.
-Then go in the subtitle editor and go to bulk translate, switch one side to the language I want to back up and the other in a language that doesn’t have subs so it remains empty.
-Then copy paste it in text editor on my mac so it’s formatted correctly and then paste that in our team google spreadsheet for the original subs.
-That times 4


And now due this we cannot make back ups in all for languages and the segmenters cannot put original subs back in place for all 4 languages when needed. Unless we are given the “all language moderator” status.

So Viki makes it complicated by asking us to back up subs without offering us the proper means at all. I mean Viki must have an .srt file somewhere they use to add the subs in various languages easily. Why not provide that back up for the teams to use?! Is it really that hard to provide us the back up you already have?! Now it can happen that subs are not backed up properly because the segmenters already started before the orignal subs are backed up for later use when needed. And make changes so subs need to be moved resulting in subs getting lost. Also you don’t want to delay the segmenting when someone in charge of the back up isn’t around at uploading time.

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Why would you unlock the subtitle editor? You can go to the bulk straight from the segment timer.

It’s already fixed and as CS, you should be AL Moderator and thus not have been affected.

Unfortunately, not everyone has learned the trick of fetching subs from Bulk translate.

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This should become a part of the NSSA training. There is a written tutorial here in Discussions, where I explained piranna’s method to someone else.
She briefly demonstrates it at the end of this video which is about something else.
I tweaked it a little because for me “paste special”+“values only” sometimes didn’t work, so I pass them through Notepad to clean them up before copying to the Google sheet. But for some it’s not necessary.
Dudie had to make some other tweak to make it work for Mac.
We can circulate it to all segmenters.

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I didn’t notice before I could go into Bulk Translate from the seg timer. Must have been blind. But it doesn’t really matter I guess because the episode needs to be unlocked anyway at some point.

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Yes. In text editor on a mac you must not paste it like normal but use Option-Shift-Command-V (paste and Match Style: Apply the style of the surrounding content to the item pasted within that content.), copy that and then paste special + values only in the google spreadsheet. Took me a little while to figure that out.

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It matters to some extent. If the subtitle editor is open, some people might start translating
 and lock their languages, which hinders you in your work. As all-language mod, you can reopen them, but even then, it’s a pain. As a segmenter, you have to wait for someone else to reopen them and until then, you are stuck.

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