I would like to share with all of you good news that RSS rate limiter has been changed from 300 seconds to 60 seconds.
This change was released yesterday - 16th of February.
Once again, we apologize for the inconvenience caused during this whole process and thank you for your patience and understanding.
Maria Dąbrowska
Edited by maria.dabrowska
16
erik.rothoff
@Rico Tero I'm the owner of feeder.co, an RSS reader used by many Gengo users. Can you forward my email erik@feeder.co so I can give some input on what's wrong with the current implementation?
14
Ryan
I tried to be patient all this time, but all these uncertainties and unanswered questions are slowly killing me. @Rica or anyone from Gengo, could you please give us an update regarding the situation over there? Are the Tech Team still working to fix the rss? Or are they working on a completely new notification method (hence why this taking so long)? Does this problem in any way affect the customers side as well when ordering a translation (the declining of job volume nowadays)?
14
InmaDG
Rica, could you give us any update? This is frustrating 😭
14
johann.huck
I agree with @marcelito: Gengo created this problem themselves by inviting more and more translators into a language pair without having the corresponding job volume. As a consequence, it puts more pressure on everyone to find and accept jobs. I've been working with Gengo for almost 12 years now.
I can remember times when you didn't have to hurry to press the "Accept" button, but you could check out a Pro job for 30 to 60 seconds before accepting it. Gengo is always touting its pick-up times nowadays, but I don't think the customer cares if their job is picked up within 5 seconds or within a minute or two.
In my view, my language pair (EN>DE) is overcrowded since 2019, shortly after Gengo got a huge PEMT order from a retailer. The situation never improved, even though I addressed this concern many times with the support team or in response to Lionbridge's community surveys (and I'm sure the devs knew about this too). Instead, Gengo continues to accept new translators, even though the job volume has been clearly declining in the last few years since Corona.
11
erik.rothoff
Hi Rico, I just replied to your e-mail. Since we have a lot of Gengo users using Feeder, it would make sense that you can contact us when you update the limits so we can update our system accordingly. 1 request per 10 minutes doesn't really make sense given how Gengo works. We've had discussions about helping Gengo with faster systems that would reduce strain. I hope we can help out here.
10
InmaDG
Morning Rica,
Any news about the RSS problem?
10
InmaDG
Thank you very much Rica,
This problem is taking a long time to be solved, and the latest request from the support team to set alerts to 600 seconds is like having no alerts at all.
Hopefully you will be able to give us some good news soon!
10
Heyke
With an interval of 600 seconds, it is pointless to pay for an RSS feed because simply refreshing the page will get you more jobs.
9
erik.rothoff
@Rica Tero the RSS literally shows an error, instead of the cached results. This is breaking a lot of RSS readers and causing confusion
9
Claudius
Aren't bots for auto-accepting jobs forbidden and their use supposed to lead to the BAN of the translator? I remember reading something like that in the guidelines. It's a question of honor that we are now expecting strict measures and action from Gengo against the hackers/job thieves.
9
doker
300 seconds isn't enough. It doesn't solve any problems.
8
bedinoalex
@Alessandro same situation here and refreshing the page doesn't help either. This is sad and disappointing as Gengo has been a source of income for years and this feed issue has been affecting us all (and I believe the customers as well).
@Rica any update? We really need to get back to work.. thank you
8
Val
I wonder what customer experience is like these days. To be honest, I expect no changes if it's not affecting revenues or customer experience. There have been no efforts to improve translator experience in years, even with known issues, even if Support is notified of an issue. Someone will pick it up, even if it's only the job thieves. They must be having a field day, although I guess it will affect metrics such as response time. Because we might be wondering how they do it, but it's clear they do it somehow. Just check the thread in the Spanish-language forum a few months ago where many translators shared the same experience of only being able to claim jobs being rejected by the same few translators.
8
avilanw
No, no, maria.dabrowska, 300 sec doesn't solve anything...
7
Mike
I have been not receiving any job notifications since early December. In the past few days, after reading the comments in this thread, I tried changing the refresh interval of my RSS feed reader to 5 minutes and even 10 minutes (600 seconds, as recommended by Rica in this thread) and the feed still doesn't work. I get this error: "HTTP ERROR 429". It is urgent that you guys give a solution to this problem.
7
Fernando
Same. Mine pretty much stopped working since early December, and hasn't worked ever since, no matter how many updates we get about how the RSS feed is working again, and no matter what time interval I set it to. I've tried to be really patient and understanding from the beginning, but even that has its limits. Maybe it is time to reconsider who is behind the tech team and behind the decision-making of this whole ordeal, as it's looking like it is way beyond their capacities, and their inability to solve this issue is actually having a harmful effect and real-life consequences on others. As others have pointed out already, despite many issues on the Gengo platform itself in recent years, the RSS feed has been the one constant that never failed and has always worked throughout the same period of time.
7
kevin.thoma88
@Val I agree, there clearly is a way to still pick up jobs quickly. Most of the ones I've been able to get recently were also rejected multiple times, and you can actually see in the log (comments section) that each previous translator picked up the job within one minute of it becoming available. I can't imagine that consistently happening through manual refreshing of the dashboard.
So there's probably little change in response time, and since these translators still have their qualifications, I guess the quality must be decent enough? None of which bodes well for us who try to play fair, because there's no incentive for Gengo/Lionbridge to make this a priority.
Edited by kevin.thoma88
7
Alessandro Bregalda
The funny thing is that Lionbridge keeps to report via email the weekly overview for the available jobs, which amount seems quite normal. At this point, as many noticed, I wonder where those jobs end up or who completes them.
7
bedinoalex
I submitted a ticket, let's see
7
marcelito
I don't think there are necessarily bots involved. I'll use my language pair as an example, according to this link https://gengo.com/hire-translators/english/spanish-latin-america/, there are 77 active translators. Back then when the RSS was working properly, I used to get about 10 notifications each day, I know there were probably many jobs that were grabbed before they could get picked up by my RSS feed, but I think it is safe to assume that there aren't enough daily jobs so that each translator can pick one.
So right now, if at any given moment of the day, there are let's say (at least) 3 out of those 77 translators manually refreshing the dashboard, that would explain how jobs are still getting picked up as fast as before.
7
Yasemin Erdem
Hi Maria,
Thanks for the update. 300 seconds sounds better than nothing, but will still not be enough for those of us using (paid or unpaid) feeder services. When do you think it will be back to the way it was? Thanks.
6
Heyke
Gengo support just told me they are aware of the problem and working on it.
Edited by Heyke
6
SagaGemini
@Rica Tero Any news at all?
6
SagaGemini
And it will get you next to no jobs since some people are obviously using auto-refresh bots.
6
SagaGemini
Heike S., I wouldn't think that they are necessarily the same people. As for people who submit non-edited machine translations, I don't think they keep their qualifications for very long anyway. There were a lot of those (at least in my language pair; EN-FR) during the Twitter project back in the spring of 2020, but I'm pretty sure most of them got taken care of. Personally, I play by the rule because it's a matter of personal ethics and it's only fair to other translators. And I also hope that measures are being taken to prevent any further abuse of the system, because it does indeed affect us all, who are just trying to make a honest living.
6
M8net
Same here with EN-IT. With an update interval of 600 I get random notification, and - like always - I only get the ones that pay pennies. Already reported the problem to support team, but in 10+ days I had no useful replies.
6
Alexander
@SagaGemini - If you mean a way to automatically refresh the dashboard, that's not very useful. You still have to stare at the screen to see if a job arrived, so while you are staring you might as well refresh manually from time to time. Moreover, the automatic refresh works against you when the page refreshes at the moment you try to grab a job.
The core problem is in most pairs there are more translators than jobs. If Gengo were to assign a job directly to an individual translator and notify them by email (demanding they accept within N minutes or the job will be reassigned), that would take away both for Gengo and for the translators all disadvantages from the rat race grabbing jobs currently is.
6
Alexander
@M8net - Even if it were possible to automatically grab a job, that would only make sense for a translator who is willing to work on any job at any time the bot takes one, or Gengo would sooner or later notice unreasonable many jobs expire or are declined by this translator.
But I tend to believe Gengo when they say such a trick is not possible. When I started creating RumpelstiltskinRSS, I spent much time studying both the RSS feed and the dashboard details, and found only one back door, which later on was removed, and even that back door was not enough to do something that comes close to what you describe.
As for the RSS feed, in my understanding it is not down, Gengo is just stricter with rationing than before. Gengo used to maintain a per translator cache which was only refreshed after 60 seconds and which you could (but were not supposed to) access dozens of times during that period. Now this 60 seconds interval has been changed to 600 seconds, and if you try more often than allowed you will get an error.
For example, if you set your reader to check every 100 seconds, you will get: at t = 0: info about jobs, if any, available at t = 0; at t = 100: an error message; at t = 200: an error message; at t = 300: an error message; at t = 400: an error message; at t = 500: an error message; at t = 600: info about jobs, if any, available at t = 600.
While inconvenient, this affects all translators in the same way.
6
Michael Hughes
@Alessandro Same here, used to be about 70 jobs a day through Feeder.co and now about 10. I just don't understand how other translators are picking up the jobs though? Surely people aren't sitting there refreshing the dashboard every 60 seconds.
support
188 comments
Hello everyone,
I would like to share with all of you good news that RSS rate limiter has been changed from 300 seconds to 60 seconds.
This change was released yesterday - 16th of February.
Once again, we apologize for the inconvenience caused during this whole process and thank you for your patience and understanding.
Maria Dąbrowska
@Rico Tero I'm the owner of feeder.co, an RSS reader used by many Gengo users. Can you forward my email erik@feeder.co so I can give some input on what's wrong with the current implementation?
I tried to be patient all this time, but all these uncertainties and unanswered questions are slowly killing me. @Rica or anyone from Gengo, could you please give us an update regarding the situation over there? Are the Tech Team still working to fix the rss? Or are they working on a completely new notification method (hence why this taking so long)? Does this problem in any way affect the customers side as well when ordering a translation (the declining of job volume nowadays)?
Rica, could you give us any update? This is frustrating 😭
I agree with @marcelito: Gengo created this problem themselves by inviting more and more translators into a language pair without having the corresponding job volume. As a consequence, it puts more pressure on everyone to find and accept jobs. I've been working with Gengo for almost 12 years now.
I can remember times when you didn't have to hurry to press the "Accept" button, but you could check out a Pro job for 30 to 60 seconds before accepting it. Gengo is always touting its pick-up times nowadays, but I don't think the customer cares if their job is picked up within 5 seconds or within a minute or two.
In my view, my language pair (EN>DE) is overcrowded since 2019, shortly after Gengo got a huge PEMT order from a retailer. The situation never improved, even though I addressed this concern many times with the support team or in response to Lionbridge's community surveys (and I'm sure the devs knew about this too). Instead, Gengo continues to accept new translators, even though the job volume has been clearly declining in the last few years since Corona.
Hi Rico, I just replied to your e-mail. Since we have a lot of Gengo users using Feeder, it would make sense that you can contact us when you update the limits so we can update our system accordingly. 1 request per 10 minutes doesn't really make sense given how Gengo works. We've had discussions about helping Gengo with faster systems that would reduce strain. I hope we can help out here.
Morning Rica,
Any news about the RSS problem?
Thank you very much Rica,
This problem is taking a long time to be solved, and the latest request from the support team to set alerts to 600 seconds is like having no alerts at all.
Hopefully you will be able to give us some good news soon!
With an interval of 600 seconds, it is pointless to pay for an RSS feed because simply refreshing the page will get you more jobs.
@Rica Tero the RSS literally shows an error, instead of the cached results. This is breaking a lot of RSS readers and causing confusion
Aren't bots for auto-accepting jobs forbidden and their use supposed to lead to the BAN of the translator? I remember reading something like that in the guidelines. It's a question of honor that we are now expecting strict measures and action from Gengo against the hackers/job thieves.
300 seconds isn't enough. It doesn't solve any problems.
@Alessandro same situation here and refreshing the page doesn't help either. This is sad and disappointing as Gengo has been a source of income for years and this feed issue has been affecting us all (and I believe the customers as well).
@Rica any update? We really need to get back to work.. thank you
I wonder what customer experience is like these days. To be honest, I expect no changes if it's not affecting revenues or customer experience. There have been no efforts to improve translator experience in years, even with known issues, even if Support is notified of an issue. Someone will pick it up, even if it's only the job thieves. They must be having a field day, although I guess it will affect metrics such as response time. Because we might be wondering how they do it, but it's clear they do it somehow. Just check the thread in the Spanish-language forum a few months ago where many translators shared the same experience of only being able to claim jobs being rejected by the same few translators.
No, no, maria.dabrowska, 300 sec doesn't solve anything...
I have been not receiving any job notifications since early December. In the past few days, after reading the comments in this thread, I tried changing the refresh interval of my RSS feed reader to 5 minutes and even 10 minutes (600 seconds, as recommended by Rica in this thread) and the feed still doesn't work. I get this error: "HTTP ERROR 429". It is urgent that you guys give a solution to this problem.
Same. Mine pretty much stopped working since early December, and hasn't worked ever since, no matter how many updates we get about how the RSS feed is working again, and no matter what time interval I set it to. I've tried to be really patient and understanding from the beginning, but even that has its limits. Maybe it is time to reconsider who is behind the tech team and behind the decision-making of this whole ordeal, as it's looking like it is way beyond their capacities, and their inability to solve this issue is actually having a harmful effect and real-life consequences on others. As others have pointed out already, despite many issues on the Gengo platform itself in recent years, the RSS feed has been the one constant that never failed and has always worked throughout the same period of time.
@Val I agree, there clearly is a way to still pick up jobs quickly. Most of the ones I've been able to get recently were also rejected multiple times, and you can actually see in the log (comments section) that each previous translator picked up the job within one minute of it becoming available. I can't imagine that consistently happening through manual refreshing of the dashboard.
So there's probably little change in response time, and since these translators still have their qualifications, I guess the quality must be decent enough? None of which bodes well for us who try to play fair, because there's no incentive for Gengo/Lionbridge to make this a priority.
The funny thing is that Lionbridge keeps to report via email the weekly overview for the available jobs, which amount seems quite normal. At this point, as many noticed, I wonder where those jobs end up or who completes them.
I submitted a ticket, let's see
I don't think there are necessarily bots involved. I'll use my language pair as an example, according to this link https://gengo.com/hire-translators/english/spanish-latin-america/, there are 77 active translators. Back then when the RSS was working properly, I used to get about 10 notifications each day, I know there were probably many jobs that were grabbed before they could get picked up by my RSS feed, but I think it is safe to assume that there aren't enough daily jobs so that each translator can pick one.
So right now, if at any given moment of the day, there are let's say (at least) 3 out of those 77 translators manually refreshing the dashboard, that would explain how jobs are still getting picked up as fast as before.
Hi Maria,
Thanks for the update. 300 seconds sounds better than nothing, but will still not be enough for those of us using (paid or unpaid) feeder services. When do you think it will be back to the way it was? Thanks.
Gengo support just told me they are aware of the problem and working on it.
@Rica Tero Any news at all?
And it will get you next to no jobs since some people are obviously using auto-refresh bots.
Heike S., I wouldn't think that they are necessarily the same people. As for people who submit non-edited machine translations, I don't think they keep their qualifications for very long anyway. There were a lot of those (at least in my language pair; EN-FR) during the Twitter project back in the spring of 2020, but I'm pretty sure most of them got taken care of. Personally, I play by the rule because it's a matter of personal ethics and it's only fair to other translators. And I also hope that measures are being taken to prevent any further abuse of the system, because it does indeed affect us all, who are just trying to make a honest living.
Same here with EN-IT. With an update interval of 600 I get random notification, and - like always - I only get the ones that pay pennies.
Already reported the problem to support team, but in 10+ days I had no useful replies.
@SagaGemini - If you mean a way to automatically refresh the dashboard, that's not very useful. You still have to stare at the screen to see if a job arrived, so while you are staring you might as well refresh manually from time to time. Moreover, the automatic refresh works against you when the page refreshes at the moment you try to grab a job.
The core problem is in most pairs there are more translators than jobs. If Gengo were to assign a job directly to an individual translator and notify them by email (demanding they accept within N minutes or the job will be reassigned), that would take away both for Gengo and for the translators all disadvantages from the rat race grabbing jobs currently is.
@M8net - Even if it were possible to automatically grab a job, that would only make sense for a translator who is willing to work on any job at any time the bot takes one, or Gengo would sooner or later notice unreasonable many jobs expire or are declined by this translator.
But I tend to believe Gengo when they say such a trick is not possible. When I started creating RumpelstiltskinRSS, I spent much time studying both the RSS feed and the dashboard details, and found only one back door, which later on was removed, and even that back door was not enough to do something that comes close to what you describe.
As for the RSS feed, in my understanding it is not down, Gengo is just stricter with rationing than before. Gengo used to maintain a per translator cache which was only refreshed after 60 seconds and which you could (but were not supposed to) access dozens of times during that period. Now this 60 seconds interval has been changed to 600 seconds, and if you try more often than allowed you will get an error.
For example, if you set your reader to check every 100 seconds, you will get:
at t = 0: info about jobs, if any, available at t = 0;
at t = 100: an error message;
at t = 200: an error message;
at t = 300: an error message;
at t = 400: an error message;
at t = 500: an error message;
at t = 600: info about jobs, if any, available at t = 600.
While inconvenient, this affects all translators in the same way.
@Alessandro Same here, used to be about 70 jobs a day through Feeder.co and now about 10. I just don't understand how other translators are picking up the jobs though? Surely people aren't sitting there refreshing the dashboard every 60 seconds.