Freesound Forums

I've uploaded 2 new sounds on May 17th and still awaiting moderation for 3 days now.......

Sound's moderation state is set to Pending
Sound's processing state is set to OK

Not sure why some users get their uploaded sounds moderated and released the same day and why it takes longer for us other users. Are some of the moderators on vacation? How many moderators does this site have anyway? And how are their work hours? Are some users prefered and others put on pending?

I guess I should rather ask: What is the best time in a day and in a week to upload sounds here, so they get moderated the same day or the next day at least? May 17th 2015 was a Sunday, btw. Probably not the best time to upload sounds on Sundays, I guess.

Anyway, I also like to express my personal opinion that this whole "moderation" business is a bad idea altogether. Don't get me wrong, sure it is necessary to check if uploaded sounds are legit and do not violate any copyright, but you can overdo things with this kind of "you are guilty until proven innocent" practice. I think it's better to let users upload their sounds and be released on freesound instantly. And when something is illegal then the community can flag it.

You know, like on Youtube. Imagine each of the millions of youtube videos uploaded every day would not be released instantly but would have to go through a moderation procedure. It would take weeks and months and thousands of employed moderators to check each file for validity. And as you know, Youtube have smart automated filters to scan uploaded stuff, so you don't need to employ people for that anymore.

Freesound should implement such a feature too imo. Because moderation just takes too much time and it is completely unpredictable, because it probably depends also on the mood of the moderator when he/she will look into someone's uploaded sounds and unlock them. With the freesound community and number of registered users growing, the operators of this site will have no choice to think about a better method to validate the growing mass of uploaded sounds, unless they employ more moderators to do the job quicker.

So far for this topic. I'm going to upload some more sounds this week and I hope they will be moderated and unlocked ASAP, so I don't have to wait for weeks or even months like other users have experienced.

Cheers

Imagine the money youtube has in case of any litigation.
Now imagine the money freesound has.

Please don’t take this personally, Zetauri, but the number of people that are asking the same questions/making the same complaints about moderation is becoming frustrating.

For what it’s worth, I’m the first to say that Zetauri and others who have posted threads on this topic make valid points, and indeed some of the staff (of whom I am not one) have themselves raised the question of whether switching to a community-moderated system might be a good idea. This is something on which I have no position as such, as I don’t get all that angry when my sounds spend days or weeks in moderation limbo, but which is often suggested.

How many moderators does this site have anyway? And how are their work hours? Are some users prefered and others put on pending?

Some users are ‘trusted’ not to upload any irrelevant or copyright-infringing material. I don’t know which ones, or how many, and I also don’t know how many mods there are. There are no set hours, as all are volunteers (which also precludes ‘employing’ more of them). I suspect the reason that their status isn’t writ large next to their usernames is so they don’t attract unwanted attention/private messages/etc.

Anyway, returning to the point with which I began this post, I think that someone (I might myself be able to help with this) should draft a sticky thread on the theme of “Before asking anything about moderation, read this.” The developers of Ardour, which is the backbone of my home music making, have a similar sort of article on their website: http://ardour.org/support_expectations.html.

I really think the material reasons that Freesound isn’t an ‘ideal world’ in this sense — run by volunteers and donations, doesn’t have an in-house legal team etc. — have to be collected and explained in one place, so users have the right idea about how, for better or worse, things work here.

jamesabdulrahman wrote:
For what it’s worth, I’m the first to say that Zetauri and others who have posted threads on this topic make valid points, and indeed some of the staff (of whom I am not one) have themselves raised the question of whether switching to a community-moderated system might be a good idea. This is something on which I have no position as such, as I don’t get all that angry when my sounds spend days or weeks in moderation limbo, but which is often suggested.

Well, I'm not angry but I'm wondering what kind of problem might be with my sounds. Because the 2 new sounds which I've uploaded 4 days ago were generated from scratch with a random waveform algorithm which I have developed and coded recently. My algorithm works like a white noise generator but creates more realistic ambient sounds and less noisy chaotic sounds. I will upload more samples of those.

So there is no copyright infringement there anyway. It's all legit. Alien technology
(One can't copyright random noise and VST/computer-generated sounds like that actually, but that's another topic entirely which I'm not going to debate on.)

I set my sounds to a "CC-Attribution" license. Perhaps that's what causes the delay, because the moderators have to validate the sounds more carefully in respect to the license type. The license could be a bit too overkill for my type of sounds. Maybe I should set my uploaded sounds to a "CC-0" license instead to get them moderated faster. I don't know what that will do to the moderation process however. I guess I just try it.

You seem to agree with my idea of a community-moderated system. After all freesound.org is a community of sound creators. We love to create our own sounds.

Perhaps that's another problem. The moderators don't know me that well. I'm a casual user on this site. I don't know about hundreds of users complaing either (I just noticed one another user who noted that his sound took a month to be moderated), because I don't follow the forums that often. I barely uploaded 2 sounds back in 2013 which you can find on my profile. Now in 2015 I uploaded another 2 sounds. If I uploaded more sounds more often the moderators would finally figure that it's all self-made and legit in my case.

Anyway, my final question is: How long am I expected to wait in a worst case scenario until my sounds get unlocked finally? Can someone give an estimate number in days, weeks or months?

Thanks in advance.

Most of the time moderation takes no more than 2-3 days.
Sometimes a lot of sounds are uploaded at the same time or there aren't many mods around and takes longer.
In the case where took 1 month something most have gone wrong. Sometimes uploads fail, or something like that.

Mods seem to be quite busy at the moment. That seems to be why moderation is slow.
Type of license for the sounds makes no diference. The queu is sequential and sounds are pulled in order of arrival.

You seem to agree with my idea of a community-moderated system.

I neither agree nor disagree. What I said was that I had no real position on this question.

How long am I expected to wait in a worst case scenario until my sounds get unlocked finally? Can someone give an estimate number in days, weeks or months?

I’ve never had to wait longer than a couple of weeks at worst. Most of my sounds have been modded in a couple of days.

I actually, think the moderation system is pretty robust right now. Yes it takes longer for sounds to appear public on the site, but it means that people searching for sounds have better results.

You should see the amount of spam, illegal rips and produced music that comes through. That would ultimately clutter the search results for consumers of Freesound.

If you want detail for moderation, go to here:

How long does moderation usually take?

Alright, sounds are public. But one of the sounds does not appear in the public list aka browser on the freesound homepage, only if you click on my profile or the link to the according soundpack...

AlienXXX wrote:
Most of the time moderation takes no more than 2-3 days.

Well, the moderation of those 2 particular sounds of mine took more than 3 days.

In 2013 when I uploaded my first 2 sounds ever on this website it took something like 2-3 days, yeah.
But in 2015 it seems things have changed and become more difficult for whatever reason.
When I'm going to upload new sounds now I have to plan a week ahead or know that it can take up to a week until sounds are public. This sucks but I'm able to compensate for this discrepancy.

The queu is sequential and sounds are pulled in order of arrival.

No, that's not the case and I can prove it. JimiMod uploaded some sounds the same day on May 17th and the sounds appeared publicly the same day. I also uploaded my sounds on May 17th and therefore I was in the same queue that day. But the moderation of my sounds took almost a week.

If sounds were pulled in order of arrival, as you claim, then my sounds would have been moderated and published the same day as JimiMod's sounds. But they weren't. So that's self-evident.

I mean I know there are uploaders on freesound who are prefered and more trusted by the mods than others. There is no question about it, whether the mods like to admit it or not. I have no problem with that however. It's logical that moderators have to mistrust the majority of uploaders in order to stop illegal pirated spam.

Which brings me to my final question on this subject:
What does it take to gain the ultimate trust by the moderators and become one of the favored uploaders?

I know freesound is no popularity contest, but I'm just wondering...

Zetauri wrote:
JimiMod uploaded some sounds the same day on May 17th and the sounds appeared publicly the same day.

JimiMod is whitelisted I believe, that would be the reason.

AlienXXX is right, the queue is ordered in chronological order. Sounds are pulled in order of upload date (oldest first) - there is no discrimination going on here.

You asked about becoming a whitelisted user, perhaps upload more sounds and you will be noticed as a much more valuable contributor. You only have 4, which isn't really enough to get the attention of the Mods to be honest, even if your uploads are immaculate and problem free. This process is discretionary, but will be subject to a veto if applicable.

Just as an additional note:

Have a look at this user - http://www.freesound.org/people/Philip%20Goddard/

Now this to me is the perfect example of a user who is applicably white-listed. This is not the ultimate example to imitate, but just one user who has surpassed all expectations for a valued contributor and demonstrates what we expect from consistency of sound information.

That is the only factor here really, consistency

Hope this helped

(sorry Philip, I hope you don't mind the public example if you happen to see this)

Headphaze wrote:
You asked about becoming a whitelisted user, perhaps upload more sounds and you will be noticed as a much more valuable contributor. You only have 4, which isn't really enough to get the attention of the Mods to be honest, even if your uploads are immaculate and problem free.

Naah, I'm a casual uploader. I only upload sounds when I'm in the mood or when I have a sound project going. Don't expect me to upload tons of soundfiles every day. I'm not that type of user.

Thanks for the replies anyway, guys. I will see what's going to happen when I upload another soundfile, maybe next year...

Zetauri wrote:
Thanks for the replies anyway, guys. I will see what's going to happen when I upload another soundfile, maybe next year...

Yeah... I know... Moderation has pros and cons. It keeps the site quite clean of audio spam, illegal uploads and produced music (which we don't want), but is human-driven, so slow and not error-free.

If you uploaded a sound that you needed to have on the site very urgently (school project, etc...), you can try to contact one of the mods by PM and make a request. Sounds CAN be pulled out of the moderation queue out of sequence, but we generally don't do that.

Another point is that the system will pull all sounds from an uploader that are on the moderation queue at the same time (we can't just pull one of them). These sounds are pulled to the Mod's own queue and get approved one by one after the Mod has looked at them. If the Mod has questions he contacts the user, that sound is left 'on hold' in his queue until he gets a reply and he can move on to the next sound.

The process is not purely sequential (it used to be!), several Mods can work in parallel.
So, it is possible for a sound to be uploaded later and become available at Freesound earlier
Imagine sounds from user A are at the front of the queue and user B is second. Moderator Alpha pulls all the sounds from A, but has to stop before moderating them all (or user A has 50 sounds and takes some time for the Mod to go through all of them).
Mod Beta pulls the sounds from user B. If user B only had one sound, that sound could be moderated ahead of most of A's sounds...
The current system is the best balance between a sequential queue (first uploaded, first moderated) and allowing Mods to work in parallel.
The first system only allowed 1 sound to be pulled from the queue at a time. And sounds with 'questions' would hold up the queue! - That only worked when the volume of uploads was not too large.

As for whitelisting - Frequent uploaders, who clearly don't upload prohibited contents and who use good descriptions and tags are (eventually) whitelisted. Their sounds do not need moderation, there is nothing to check: they know what they are doing and we trust them.

Thanks, AlienXXX.
I may be in the mood to create and upload more sounds in 2015. You never know.

BAM! Another sound of mine dropped in limbo.
Uploaded on June 17th... 3 days... Moderation still pending......

At this point I like to mention that the previous sound which I uploaded
on June 6th was moderated and unlocked the same day. So the moderators
do process sounds faster. Sometimes things seem to become very slow though.

Funny coincidence: Remember when I started this topic back in May?
I uploaded my two horror ambient sounds on May 17th and they were
moderated after 4-5 days. Seems like the 17th of a month is a critical
day to upload sounds. But I don't want to make any speculations.

I can't see it. So it is either already moderated or has been pulled into one of the moderators' queues.

Things don't seem to bad: we have 75 sounds on the general queue now. None of these is older than 1 day.

Speaking for myself, I have had about 15 min of personal time each day last week. - That is the time I have had to make music and sometimes moderate sounds.
So, yeah, things can get slow. Considering we do this for free, in our free time and out of goodwill.. It is difficult to plan who or how many of us will be moderating at each time, and impossible to commit to any modeation turnaroud time.
The number of sounds uploaded per day also varies wildly from a few tens to many hundreds...

AlienXXX wrote:
I can't see it. So it is either already moderated or has been pulled into one of the moderators' queues.

Then it seems to have been pulled into one of the other moderators' queues, because it's still in pending mode in the "Uploaded sounds awaiting moderation" section of my account.

The link to my new sound:
http://www.freesound.org/people/Zetauri/sounds/276804/

It still says "Be advised, this file has not been moderated yet."
(If you are not a moderator then you may get a "page not found" message after clicking the link,
because the page has not been unlocked yet. It's only visible for the mods and me at this point.)

Things don't seem to bad: we have 75 sounds on the general queue now. None of these is older than 1 day.

If this is the case, as you say, then something must have gone terribly wrong again or you have one moderator here who does things very slowly or currently does not have any time to moderate sounds since days.

Speaking for myself, I have had about 15 min of personal time each day last week. - That is the time I have had to make music and sometimes moderate sounds.
So, yeah, things can get slow. Considering we do this for free, in our free time and out of goodwill.. It is difficult to plan who or how many of us will be moderating at each time, and impossible to commit to any modeation turnaroud time.
The number of sounds uploaded per day also varies wildly from a few tens to many hundreds...

That explains the long pending times. I appreciate that you guys spare your time to moderate sounds of all us users one by one every day. And I really don't like to file complaints all the time, because I like to keep things smooth. However, this time something went wrong again and I don't know what to do now.

Should I re-upload my sound again today? Maybe that helps...

I post the link to the moderation ticket here aswell:
http://www.freesound.org/tickets/6ff0fe38d21a4d34b8ef3608e70d575e/

I'm not sure but I think it has the name of the moderator it is assigned to:

Ticket details

created by Zetauri
assigned to qubodup
status is Accepted
queue is sound moderation

created on June 17, 2015, 1:12 a.m.
last modified on June 18, 2015, 9:56 p.m.
related to sound 276804

Sound's moderation state is set to Pending
Sound's processing state is set to OK

Soundisnoise wrote:
Just uplaoded two sound too. Waiting for moderation...................

I just approved your sounds. Should be live now.

@ Zetauri Are your sounds still in Limbo? If so then we can investigate the hold up.

Cheers,
HP

Headphaze wrote:
@ Zetauri Are your sounds still in Limbo? If so then we can investigate the hold up.

Cheers,
HP

Still in limbo......... (see ticket link on page 1)

My uploaded sound has been assigned to the following moderator:
http://www.freesound.org/people/qubodup/

The user still hasn't moderated the sound yet.