OpenSubtitles forum

I wonder to know why it is impossible to upload new subtitles by replacing older version. It would be very useful to have the possibility to improve the text this way.

But maybe there is another way for uploading with replacement and I know nothing about it. If it is possible please let me know how can I do this useful process can be done.

Thanks in advance for the reply
nextrade

You can still upload a new one, but the content
should be diffent, that means that when you change the last sentence you get another content, or
when you put to the credits your name because you changed and corrected many things.
After that you can ask to a moderator/adminitrator to delete the first one, or leave it Online.

If the old version was uploaded by you, you can just disable it. That's practically the same as deleting. Of course the number of downloads and rating of the older version will also disappear.

There have been long discussions about a versioning system in this forum. Some other sites allow users to edit subtitles line by line. But interactive editing is something that is hard to design and get right, as can be seen in Wikipedia (as a negative example). I don't expect this feature to come to Opensubtitles in the near future.

Actually, most of our current subtitles (especially for TV series) come from wiki-based subtitle databases like addic7ed. They're proven to work (edits are not anonymous like the wikipedia, and bad users are banned).

A versioning system is a good idea for several reasons:

-It allows to have just two subtitles for the same video file and language (one for hearing impaired, one just speech)

-It allows for the same subtitle text to exist in different timings (so videos slightly off have the same quality in subtitles as others).

-It allows for the actual creators, translators and editors to be credited and their work unequivocally related to them, instead of slapping sloppy credits in the subtitles themselves.

In these systems you *can* edit online if you wish so, but you can also download a file and later upload it again. As long as you only either edit the timings or the subtitles the system can perfectly handle the upload afterwards (the file can even be "reserved" for a couple of days to allow this).

Implementing this is less of a problem than it seems, since the whole wikisubtitles sourcebase can just be obtained and implemented. The only hooks needed in OpenSubtitles would be:

-Link for registered users to edit or create a new version of existing subs in the wiki
-TAG for versioned subtitles so they're preferred over other ones.
-OpenSubtitles always using the "tagged" subtitles from the wiki, not the database.

I know this is not simple as such, but it's much simpler than implementing a whole system from scratch.

An added benefit is that the format could be standardized as well.