Why are my reviews being stealth hidden?

I just noticed that 8 out of my 12 reviews are stealthily hidden when I'm not logged in, and no reason is given.
I spent a lot of time on some of these and I try to write about things that aren't said in other reviews, especially translation quality, so I'm really not happy about this.
Which review is being let through also seems very arbitrary and unrelated to swear words or length.
The stealth aspect of this censorship is very wrong. I don't know if this has been going on unnoticed or what, but I expect an explanation. I will write about this elsewhere if you hide this post.

 

When did you write these reviews?

 

Could it be that there are some spoilers? or details that are being screen as spoilers?

 

From 2019 to now.

Very sure there aren't. The only thing I can see is admins don't want people to comment on the translation, but even then the reviews that got through talk about that just as much.

 

I'm not sure what you're asking me to report. Given that you've linked a guideline that says you're not supposed to review the translation, you want me to report my remaining reviews to get them removed?
If not, are you asking me to report reviews being stealthily hidden, which I had no way to know was even happening?
Either way your request seems absurd. And obviously I wholly disagree with this guideline. Translation quality is a huge part of the product being reviewed here and should definitely be something people looking for a novel can be informed about.
But clearly I'm not about to be changing the site's guideline. I'm still asking why my reviews were hidden stealthily without a reason given.

 

What 12 reviews have you done? Just curious if they are stealth hidden or not. I doubt it though but ive seen crazier things. Link the novels please...

https://www.novelupdates.com/user/97594/tamix/

When looking on this page i only see 4 reviews. That means that your other reviews I can't see them if they exist. Show us on your end if they exist.

 

thanks for the answer.

 

I guess what the mod means by reporting your review would be to ask them to double check to approve your review, and ask what needs to be changed for every review that they didn't considered to let though.


I don't think this was a malicious attempt at censorship.

 

Well I can't post links then I guess.

And to be clear, what's happening is most of my reviews are visible and displayed normally to me, but hidden to everyone else, which prevents the author from realizing he's being censored. So me and probably many others just keep on wasting hours writing reviews that nobody can even see. How can they change what's wrong with the reviews when this is the way the site's handling it? Most of my reviews have one or two lines about the translation and like 50 about the novel. It's easily fixable if I just know what the problem is.

 

Just make 10 posts and you can post links.
I am sure you can find threads that you can respond to.

And it's shocking right? There is no conspiracy but I maybe partly responsible for this


I had a novel re-translated so I reported the review which was bashing the translation.
The novel is Genocide Online in case it is one of them.

Cheers!

 

Yeah, I get that, I'm just not happy about having wasted all that time when I could have been made aware long ago that there was something wrong if only it wasn't stealthily hidden, or made "personal". Every other instance of a post in process of approval has a notice of this. Not displaying that is not a "conspiracy", but I'd bet it's to save you some time on not getting resent reviews.

That was not one of them, but I agree that is a perfectly good reason to remove one such review. How often does a retranslation happen, though? Manually removing these reviews when this happens seems more appropriate. Of course, having a separate way to rate and review translations would be great, but the complete lack of such a place is why I've started writing reviews that include information about the TL, especially when it changes partway through the novel.

 

In the defense of this website, it is called novelupdates not translatorupdates.
Sadly, edited Machine translations have infested this site.
It was rare before but it is now the norm. I consider it a fool's errand to bash translations especially when these groups have no professional integrity.
Re-translation will not happen. Negative reviews which have nothing to do with the novel itself will have the opposite effect that you want, it will discourage translators from translating the novel
I know I won't pick up novels rated 3.1
Itai no Wa/Bofuri was 3.3 due to the crappy translations and later went up when I translated it even if my website still had mistakes. I was very wary of translating the novel because of the crap rating which had nothing to do with the novel but the translations

 

I wouldn't really know, but it seems rare for that scenario to play out. Also, the rating should be for the people looking for novels way more than for its translators. It's not "a review bashing its translator" but "a review warning new readers".
Anyway, the rating is apparently separate from the review in terms of policies, and as I said I'm not trying to change them either. Just want to make clear that the moderation process has some big issues. Even just making the link to the guidelines more visible would be an easy improvement. I honestly never saw it, it's blue on blue. And obviously being made aware when your review is rejected.

 

Quick reminder that this is against NU review guidelines, so this might be why most of your reviews were rejected.

 

I think MTL are much worse than they were back in the day. at least back then the ppl who dealt with MTL were at least trying to make it legible and properly edit them to make sense and they would ask others what certain words meant if google translator didn't translate the word properly.

 

Awful MTL isn't the worst part in my opinion. Someone can see that right away in the first chapter and make a decision to keep reading or not then, so pointing that out in a review is not important. What is important to me is pointing out when a translation looks good on the surface but is actually getting things wrong all over the place. (good english/editing but poor understanding of the original language)
Translations like that will make people rate and review the novel itself poorly, not knowing most of their critique is actually for the translation. I wanted to actually differentiate the translation from the novel when writing reviews.