*the bold letters is for the summary of the whole text.
At about 1:10am, May 2, I had an error, called 502: Bad Gateway. This happened as soon as I accepted a job which is worth $31.
The job required me to finish it within about 4.5 hours but when I was about to start the job, the error occured. So I reported the issue to the Gengo Support team and kept waiting hoping the website will be back online soon. I was like refreshing the website about 30 times for the next 2~3 hours not knowing when it would be fixed. After that, I was almost giving up and went to do something else.
After that happend, It was like 6 or 7 hours passed when I realized that I got an email which says the job had already expired. That mail was sent to me at about 5:50 am. So, as soon as I saw the mail, I tried to log in again but I kept having errors accessing to the work dashboard.
If I knew the expected time when the website will possibly be back online, I would've not wasted my time like this refreshing the website for 2~3 hours, rather I would do something else and come back when it's working again. And the worst is Gengo doensn't even send me any notification when the website is working again. I have no any clue on how long it will take to fix the error. So what would you do in this situation? Will you just wait doing nothing or keep refreshing the website until it is fixed? What a waste of your precious time. And I don't really understand why I can't still have the chance to work on it again at later time even though it was me who reported the issue to the Gengo. I couldn't even get any compensation for the loss of my time and the opportunity to have the job.
You know Gengo is based on the "First Come First Served" idea, and because of this I know every translators are desperate to catch the big jobs paying close attention to the computer screen otherwise what they get will be only some pennies. Furthermore, we are expected to finish the job within the allowed time. After this happend, it seems to me that Gengo only care about the customer's time not ours.
Please refer to the screenshots I uploaded.
I really appreciate you take time to read this.
11 comments
Unfortunately, Gengo has performed appallingly poorly since its acquisition by Lionbridge. The "bad gateway" issue has been a recurring one and, in my case, has been going on for two days now. Between the lack of work, the platform crashes and the lack of responsiveness from the Gengo/Lionbridge team (whose favorite answer is "the tech team is looking into it" - they should make t-shirts with that quote), I'm afraid the future of this platform and, therefore, its translators, has its days numbered.
@William
Sorry to hear this. All I can say is that the servers have seemingly been down for a few hours yesterday evening between approx. 6 to 10pm CET and also for the last couple of hours. I do believe it is affecting everybody since the issue is coming from Gengo's side, and there's been plenty of technical issues like this (especially with the servers) in the last year and a half. It's been less frequent in the last few months, but it's still happening every now and then, so I'm guessing it's still not fully fixed and the servers are still struggling to handle the load at times.
@SagaGemini, @Mae RP
Thanks for your comments.
And you know what? As soon as I posted this issue here, I got a reply from the Support team member and got a $20 as a compensation for the loss of more than 3hours and the opportunity to make $31.
Should I still be happy about being able to have the compensation? Imao
You could have asked Support to put the collection on hold. They could have pointed out that possibility to you or done so automatically, but perhaps they didn't think it was necessary or practical as you hadn't started to work on it.
@Chris
Thanks for your comment.
Of course if I knew it was taking that much long to fix the error or the Gengo informed me as soon as I reported that it might take quite awhile to be back online, I would've asked to hold the job for me. These days, the error seem to occur quite often and there were some cases that the error was like a matter for seconds, and that's why I didn't expect I would lost my job because of this.
And here's the follow-up talk that I just had with the Support team.
Hi William.
Thank you for sharing your experience in the forum.
We apologize for the inconvenience. It's understandable that the situation is really frustrating. However, we would appreciate it if you could delete the screenshot with the collection ID and blur the name of the support rep. Otherwise, we will delete the photos in the thread. I know you only want to share your concern and ask for an opinion, but we hope we can still abide by the forum guidelines.
I am grateful for you sharing this matter with us, as it pointed out the things we need to improve on, especially in this kind of situation. I will share this concern with the CM and the support team.
For everyone who will have similar issues in the future, don't hesitate to ask questions to the support team about what to do about your situation. We are not perfect, but we hope we can both do our best to make things work.
Thanks, @SagaGemini and @Chris, for sharing some insights into it. 💞
@Rica Tero
Thanks for letting me know about the forum guidelines :)
However I would like to ask what to do if the answers and compensation are not helpful and reasonable like this time. The could-have-been worst part is, although I got some compensation(but relatively small) from the representative, I might have gotten nothing If I didn't take any additional steps like posting this here and also expressing my deepest frustration to the representative one last time. You only mentioned that we should contact the Support team in order to discuss and resolve the issue, but didn't provide any further insturction on how to act when it goes in the wrong and unacceptable way.
Again, thank you for payting attention to this matter.
The same thing has happened to me on some occasions, i.e. that I have tried to submit a job during a Gengo server timeout, so that I did not know if the submission went through or not. Then I always notify support, and usually they are most helpful in holding the job and resubmitting it to me once the server issue is fixed. In some cases the job HAD actually gone through, even if I did not see that due to the server timeout.
Gunnar
Hi again William.
Thank you for blurring out the info in the screenshots. 😊
I'm not familiar yet with how the support team handles this kind of situation. However, if you or anyone else ever feels like the support didn't give justice or an acceptable response to your concern, you can send me an email at v-Rica.Tero@lionbridge.com. I will share this with Maria and coordinate with you personally so we can work on resolving your issue or concern.
Thanks, @Gunnar, for sharing your experience in this thread. 💞