I’m sure you mean well (mostly for your employer’s sake), but you shouldn’t lock viable, active and productive threads we make here on Discussions just because you find the content slightly sensitive for your employer.
If you don’t know what I mean, it is you locking the following thread 18 hours ago:
May I remind all moderators of Viki Discussions that workers (albeit, volunteers in our case) complaining about their job is a natural process in improving the working process. It is also cathartic.
Every time you close an active thread like this one, you are LIMITING OUR FREEDOM OF SPEECH.
And I don’t know about the rest of the volunteers coming here, but I am definitely becoming allergic to this.
Such a step is absolutely rude. Next time somebody thinks about doing this, maybe you should try communicating with us first, rather that shutting us up.
First and foremost rule of this collaboration between The Community (and I mean Volunteers) and Viki is OPEN communication. Which is being severely threatened if you close down threads as you one-sidedly see fit.
I’m going to stop typing now, because the keys on my keyboard are complaining at the pressure I’m using while writing this post for the third time in my years at Viki.
This is a tactic of old, well-established businesses that want to change their business scope but have a huge clientele that they can’t afford to offend.
The usual tactic for this kind of business is to alienate the customer in many invisible ways, so that the customer won’t enjoy the experience but won’t have a reason to complaint either. The new customers will not know how things used to be and the old customers will slowly disappear.
The ultimate goal is to “de-escalate complaints”. The new ones can’t complaint for things that don’t exist, the old ones won’t complaint because they will be gone.
Viki is a prime example of this business strategy.
How many Viki users do you think visit the forums?
We need prompt communication and solutions to our needs and problems.
Viki is a very special place if not I wouldn’t have stayed here for almost 13 years…
The community is everything
Each member of the community counts. Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much. That’s the power of this community
People love volunteering for Viki.
They just need a space where they can complain about the things they don’t like in hopes of changing them. Discussions IS that place. So don’t lock threads. It inhibits creativity and makes volunteers sad.
I don’t know what’s @amm11’s point. in this case. Closing (active) threads may lead to people opening 10 threads more, and it might even spark off a forum riot. So moderating requires some sensibility. Therefore, you should eventually refrain from something that might have the opposite effect.
Personally, I don’t agree on everything. There might be differences in quality or not, but a company certainly has the chance to evaluate paid subtitlers. Furthermore, some editors/moderators use the segmenting editor to sub, so it’s not visible (except for the post in the Team Discussions).
Certainly, I haven’t been around here for a decade, so I might lack some passionate spirit, but I think we all know that this ain’t heaven. With or without paid subtitlers.
How I relate to that! I posted a topic yesterday, to make them act so I overstepped a little the guidelines by sending the direct link of the drama. Few minutes after, they reacted directly by removing the post and sending me a reply to my private message that had been pending for days, regarding reports that date back to months… (soon I’ll be talking about years)
But I still wanted to discuss the matter and removed what was considered as “harmful toward a contributor”(aka the link), they removed the topic as well. The topic was about an abuser being added by the staff as mod. Funny how they are trying to reduce us to silence…
Agreed! There’s more and more arguments on Viki, it should be about time they talk it out with the community.
PLEASE @vikicommunity this has to change once and for all.
Messages pending for days???
Ok. I have to admit some take weeks or even months… And I am not talking about tickets… I am talking about DIRECT personal messages.
I don’t want to mention usernames (1 of them actually helped me in the end) but we need some reasonable consideration.
How long do we actually are expected to wait for a message to be replied by the staff?
I know we volunteers are far more than the staff but there must be some established limited period of time for us to wait.
We can’t bother all the staff members with the same requests over and over again.
It is time consuming and frustrating.
Yes, and people who don’t like me keep flagging my post (on the thread about a user’s subs being removed), and Viki complies by removing my post.
It was this one:
Summary
“the CM of One The Woman decided to take revenge (?) by removing me from the team.
However, I edited the first 7 episodes*, I have 4342 subtitles. I would of course have completed it long ago if I hadn’t gotten sick with covid and left Viki and the world for about 5 months. Now, on my contribution page, if there is no contributor designation next to the drama title, it makes me look as an abuser!
I don’t mind if the CM doesn’t want me to complete the job now. But think I deserve credit for the work I had done and I believe that erasing my presence altogether is petty and unethical.”
This was a mistake, they were actually 8 episodes, half of the drama
This post was removed. And since the message came from “System”, I have nobody to write to to complain. It’s enough that a couple of haters flag me, for Viki to mindlessly remove my post. Which had some likes, and some replies saying they agreed with me, that even if someone doesn’t complete a job, because of unavoidable reasons, they still deserve to be credited for the part of the job they did do. It’s the second time, and I’m getting really angry. They comply to the wishes of someone very new to this platform, trusting her judgement over the reasonable complaint of someone who has served Viki faithfully since 2016 (no, I’m not the oldest here, but still I’ve done my good share of work).
So yeah, in this case too (as in the abrupt closing of a thread), ZERO communication, zero respect.
The whole matter was handled weirdly indeed. Maybe there’s some policy that you shouldn’t call out people, and I understand that they rather avoid naming people on the forum. On the other hand, we had the phenomenon of shooting the messenger for a valid claim (in my opinion). Viki’s reaction therefore was some sort of weird signal. Is something only misbehavior if you did it for a year now? We call out someone who’s very obvious about it, but some don’t plan to fact all the others that might do the very same thing, but might be less notorious.
Usually, I’d expect from a community management to stick to the rules and find a good solution in accordance to them without following what’s most popular right now. Maybe Viki should learn from game management. Eventually, the approach was rather naive.
People will always strive for recognition, even if the path to it isn’t a good one. Currently, we can only hope that Viki someday checks the reports.
Ignoring them or just reversing everything might as well encourage people to continue pretending everyone. But why do we work hard if this is the result?
Every serious suggestion (including one for the suggestion box) must come with a weight of volunteers asking for it. A petition for example, to show we actually mean it.
I never wrote a username as such. But of course the fact that this person is CM on a certain drama, so whoever wanted could go and check the name.
What I’m saying is that if Viki doesn’t like something, they could message the poster saying “please edit your post to remove XYZ because it goes against X Y Z policy”, instead of removing the whole post.
I honestly don’t know about the suggestions box. Or I may have missed something. But what is lacking are not suggestions, how many suggestions are still pending via the Help center? (I suggested for example that the French word for editor should be renamed, because it’s meaningless as it is, it’s written “film editor / monteur”.)
How many suggestions have been made in Discussions. What is lacking is proper consideration of those suggestions. And I’m not sure this will change anything… Still, I’m all for improvements, so if tthis can somehow be useful in getting considered, I’m in.
There’s more and more arguments on Viki, it should be about time they talk it out with the community.
)
We call out someone who’s very obvious about it, but some don’t plan to fact all the others that might do the very same thing, but might be less notorious.
Hope your ticket is taken care of soon 
