General Information
YouTube's community contributions, that's the feature which allows viewers to add captions/subtitles, translated titles and video descriptions on videos. YouTube has decided to do away with this feature on September 28.
A year ago there was a major controversy which led to YouTube restricting the feature. Big channels were complaining about spam contributions, this was achieved by reviewing those captions through alt-accounts. So in the heat of the moment YouTube came up with a quick and dirty solution to only allow uploaders to publish these submissions (only referenced through the above Tweet and not even explained in the UI). People can still add contributions, but these are stuck in review, until uploader approval. They're still accessible in the editor, just not visible to people watching the video.
A few months later YouTube announced that they were going to retire the community contributions feature, for good, on September 28, 2020. This decision was motived by people complaining about the feature and that the YouTube Creator Studio team did not want to reimplement the interface for the new editor.
For a more exhaustive explanation click here!
YouTube has guaranteed that published captions + title/description translations will remain online, so there's nothing to worry about there. But the issue is that all unpublished captions will be deleted. This wouldn't be that big of an issue if it weren't for the above mentioned "uploaders-only" verification rule, which has left a ton of contributions in limbo. Not to mention there's no information on the fate of caption credits for published captions.
The best scenario would be for uploaders to approve these captions (since this preservers formatting, stylisation and caption credits), but seeing as only so few people have taken notice there isn't much room for optimism here.
Fortunately, there are projects for hosting community captions, most notably the recent YouTubexternal CC project, so if we can somehow grab these drafts stuck in the editor, we could bring them to life.
The task of gathering all of these unpublished captions is not an easy one, so we split it up! This repository contains a "worker" which you can run to gather community contribution data for a "tracker" (which we have already set up).
The Tracker tracks workers, the workers collect information from videos: captions in review, title/description translations in review and caption credits.
An "un-automated" version of the worker which allows you to download data for yourself instead of adding it to our collection can be found here: https://github.com/Data-Horde/ytcc-exporter