[Viki Community Team] Seg-Subtember Challenge Announcement

Viki Community Corner Contributor Community News
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Hi, everyone – We’ve cooked up a brand new challenge for this Fall, and we’re excited to share the first details with you!

Say hello to Seg-Subtember! :purple_heart:

Seg-Subtember will take place during the entire month of September with the goal of practicing your segmenting and subtitling skills by making contributing a daily habit.

This challenge is based on streaks and the rules are simple:

1. Every day, make the minimum #(number) of contributions

  1. A minimum of 3 segment contributions a day OR 6 subtitle contributions a day

2. Every day, post your streak day (that’s all that’s needed) in a dedicated Discussion thread and encourage 2 others to keep up their streak :dash:

  1. Please note: there will be no need to tag anyone (a simple press on like :heart: will suffice).

It is important that you complete both steps every day or your streak will be broken. Full details coming soon!

There will be 4 kinds of streaks: 7-day, 14-day, 21-day, or go for the gusto and complete the full 30-day streak of September!

Everyone who completes a streak will earn a badge, and the top 25 Contributors of each streak will earn a special badge in addition to their corresponding streak badge. :trophy:

Speaking of badges, we need YOUR vote to determine what becomes our official badge for Seg-Subtember! Cast your vote by Wednesday, August 16, 2023 (PDT).

:arrow_forward: Badge Voting Form

Don’t forget to vote for your favorite badge. Looking forward to having an amazing Seg-Subtember challenge with you!

Love,
Viki Community team

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What is your intuition to change the Subathon as it was?

I don’t know what to think about it yet!

The segmenters still have the problem that they don’t get any contributions at the A&C. They can work on 3 parts with a total of 400 segments and get 30 contributions for it, if they are lucky. A subber gets the full amount of contributions for the same parts.

Why do I have to make my daily contributions public? Can’t you count it like before? I translate or segment every day at Viki and do it voluntarily. Why do you want to make such a strong competition out of it? You know that the contributions of the volunteers at the Subathon are increasing. Isn’t that enough? And why should we tag two more people? To spur them on or to possibly expose them?

I think that some volunteers will not actively participate in the seg-subtember like that.

Don’t get me wrong. I like the idea of doing something new and getting different badges. Also the idea with the different streaks where you have to do something every day to pass the task. What I don’t like and what I don’t understand is why we have to make this public?

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I might be wrong here, but my hunch is the first point is to create permanent habits of contributing on Viki (especially important for newbies). While the other point is to redirect volunteers to Discussions as an attempt at better networking.

However, tags only work if a person actively checks the Discussions. If you skip a day of checking, tags don’t remind you to do it.

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This will be the first challenge, since 2017, I won’t be attending… why should I tag people to get a badge… coming online everyday and also to the discussion ??? and so on…

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Same here.

I always like to participate in Subathons, but I will definitely sit this one out.

  1. I don’t have any interest in dragging my volunteer work over several days just to maintain my streak. When I have the time to work on a part, I’ll do it and finish it. I have days when I don’t have time. It’s a hobby, not a job. And I don’t need to build a habit for 6+ subtitles per day.

  2. Why should I post my contributions per day? For me, it would be rather discouraging to see how many subtitles some contributors write in a day, let alone the fact that it shouldn’t concern anyone how much I work on Viki.

  3. I definitely won’t tag anyone. Again, why should I?

Everyone who will participate, have fun. I’ll ignore this one.

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Hi, @a_hauth_238 - Thank you for your reply! Someone introduced me to the Inktober challenge and knowing about the 100 Days of Code challenge and Duolingo streaks, we thought it would be a nice change to try something different for September. The foundation of this challenge was actually created by a previous student of mine and everyone who participated really felt the challenge demonstrated the kind of unique support that community can bring. I realize this is all new and my only hope is that everyone can keep an open mind as you learn more!

We will be sharing the details as September draws closer. But did want to say that there will be no tagging!

Please feel free to leave any additional thoughts here in the meantime. It helps greatly as we finalize things. Thank you!!

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Hi, @teufelchen_netty_266 ! So sorry if you got the impression that we’ll be asking you to tag others as that is definitely not a part of this - or anything challenge!

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So what did I get wrong here?

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And when I just do 6 subs a day, the release within 24 hours is…

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Hey @hhnike ! Appreciate you expressing your thoughts and am really sorry to hear you’ve decided to sit this one out so soon. I just wanted to say that there’s no tagging involved in this Seg-Subtember and wanted to share that when the student of mine brought in this idea of posting to the community so everyone could cheer you on it took me by surprise too. Then when the challenge started it turned out to be the best thing. Perhaps it will work. If it doesn’t, at least we tried!

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I am pretty new here; I graduated in April of this year. I got the chance to participate in this years summer subathon, which I enjoyed. It was hard because as a segmenter, projects like A&C don’t require segmenting, so most of my contributions come from subtitles for combining or dealing with open OST and end OST. But that is not always a given thing; more and more dramas are now ‘adjust only,’ where you can’t get anything at all.

I love helping on Viki, but I work long hours, so coming onto Viki every day is sometimes impossible because, before I log on, I am also a parent that has to deal with cooking and cleaning. While it’s great to earn badges and engage as a community, I don’t feel comfortable showcasing my contributions when somedays I can work on 3 parts and get no points at all.

I mean no disrespect or meanness; I just wanted to share how I feel.

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Thanks for your quick reply.

Honestly, I understand less and less what is happening at Viki. Sure, there are new employees everywhere and mistakes can happen, BUT at Viki working as a volunteer is getting harder and harder.

Staff members who are responsible for the different channels don’t answer the CMs of the channel or only very delayed (I’ve been waiting for over 6 months and still haven’t received an answer, but who cares!!!).

Other staff delete the complete contributions of volunteers because they “accidentally” press the wrong button!

Staff from marketing go into the trailers and delete the segments on released stuff and create new ones, no matter what the impact is on the other languages!

Recently Viki staff members go into dramas and change/add the OST or the text in different languages WITHOUT consulting the responsible volunteers beforehand and that although at least the German responsible persons are all active. And not to forget, the subtitles/OST are so bad that they can only have been translated by Translator!

The inbox is not suitable for active work of the volunteers, you still can not unsubscribe yourself if you have applied as CM and many things more. It still doesn’t show all the projects of the actors on their pages, which was the case before you changed this page. Not to mention all the problems you cause by changing something that no one needs.

I could write much more now, but my pizza is getting cold. That’s why I’d rather leave it for now.

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Hi @deadlykitten - I appreciate you stopping by to reply. I am a parent of twins and understand. Our goal was not for this to be a hardship but rather something where you could get support from others in the community for 10-15 minutes a day and earn a badge. Thank for sharing your thoughts & feelings on this!

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may I ask what kind of support you mean?

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Hi!

I love that we are trying something new! I love how this will help Viki volunteers get in the habit of volunteering every day for a month for those who don’t spend hours already on Viki (some of my friends, you know who you are).

And there is a but… Segmenters on A&C shows do not get a lot of credit when they work on their part. Depending on the team and how assignments are divided, each part may not have any contribution points because it’s adjusting and combining. Until this is fixed, segmenters will not enjoy this new activity. And I like to add, lately, segmenters are not even to combine segments, makes their job and volunteering less enjoyable.

I would also like to point out that some English Chief Editors on shows do not allow segmenters to paste the lyrics for the OSTs. This would make it impossible for segments to get their contributions.

Over the course of the last few years, shows are coming more and more with pre-subs and it’s really hard for volunteers to join a team. Some teams just prefer working by themselves with no proficiency in the language of the show. So even subtitlers are having a hard time finding teams to join.

Even if we want to join a team as a subtitler, the CM must find a moderator before they are added. To also be a moderator you have to have a certain status and open slots due to the 5-slot restriction.

Most importantly, I think this will be a great activity with a couple of tweaks where segmenters are able to get points when they adjust and combine.

Hoping to hear more about this activity in the coming days and hopefully, we can get our beloved segmenters and new subtitlers to enjoy volunteering at Viki.

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And the pre subs are most of the time…

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I am a new graduate of NSSA and have only dipped my toe in the segmenting waters, but I have enough experience with segmenters through my time as an editor to know the struggles they face in getting contribution credit for the amount of work they actually do. And this has only gotten worse with the new addition of adjust-only projects. Until Viki finds a way to adequately give contribution credits for the time and effort of segmenters, activities/challenges like this only serve to further discourage them.

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What is this strange challenge?! First Viki ruins one of my hobbies by having everything presegged and presubbed so we volunteeers where pushed aside and where only good enough to check if everything was ok. And now you Viki suddenly wants me to segment daily again? Does Viki even have segmenting projects I can join which are not variety shows and not A&C?! I want a proper segmenting project like it used to be before all this madness started,

Does this challenge even make sense?!

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This is going to be hard to keep track of. I most likely will forget to go to a designated thread to record every day for one. Also, I see a potential problem in volunteers coming to a project and only doing 6 sub or 3 segments and leaving a part unfinished which will cause chaos for the team. Thanks for coming up with a new idea, but I don’t see it working well for this purpose. I have done challenges using streaks, like you are mentioning, on an app before learning languages, but there I’m competing with myself.
I also second the thoughts mentioned already that there needs to be a better way to compensate the work being done by the segmenters and editors who have basically become proofreaders. As things filter down through the levels, there’s less and less things that need to be changed that will give them credit for their time. If there was a way to measure the amount of work being done for these contributers in the amount of time spent, it might be of more use. I understand this is more difficult because of the various speeds these volunteers would be working.

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Hey everyone! Thank you for taking the time to leave all of this feedback. I totally get it the apprehension. Subathons have been our thing (coming up on the 6th in a row!) and I promise that we’re not giving them up!! And I do appreciate the constructive points that a few of you have been leaving. For example, it sounds like a 30-day streak would be impossible. No problem! We can adjust. But it’s that kind of constructive feedback that truly helps us to move forward.

Unfortunately, the challenges around segment contributions exist and will exist whether we are hosting a subathon or something new or we’re not hosting anything at all. These challenges are real and really deserve their own space and conversation so please hold on to them when we can properly address!

And if you’re able and want to participate in Seg-Subtember, that’s amazing & awesome and kudos for trying it out!! And if you’re on the fence until more details are shared then thank you for staying tuned. And if you’ve already decided this isn’t for you, that’s OK too. This is a community and we respect your decision. Thanks, all!

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