Usually it’s always a circle of reasons and consequences. Everyone’s patience ends at some point (same goes with the time one is able to spend for additional potential never writing again users since time is also a limited resource and those who take their responisbility for the projects seriously have to use it wisely).
The point you did not get is that those who wasted my time recklessly created this opion or maybe I should say founded this decision - before I was always replying to everybody no matter if it was written via project finder or PM.
It’s not that hard to find this forum and ask in a thread for help when you are new. Many beginners do so and mostly those who are asking for help in the forum are those who take the volunteering work more serious.
In every project I moderated my team had beginners who were completely new to subtitling but also to VIKI. I wouldn’t stop working with beginners because being new doesn’t mean being unskilled but showing no communication skills makes everything unnecessary hard and then there is less time left for other team members or other beginners who are able to communicate and doing some own ‘research’ in the way that they write a personal message or a post in the forums.
Of course it’s also up to VIKI to provide better and easier to find information for users that are interested in joining the volunteer community but since they removed the TEAM page from the start page it was a step back and some viewers seem not to know that the subtitles and segmenting work is done by volunteers and not by VIKI as a company.
The volunteers try to make suggestions and give ideas how to make the work behind the volunteering community/subtitles for world wide audience clearer for newbies, how to give the needed information at the ‘first place’ to avoid misunderstandings and frustrating situations but instead the VIKI page becomes worse in many aspects that are directly or indirectly related to the volunteers’ work.
The volunteers can’t change the layout/design/technical aspects of VIKI but your post and others show that certain problems in getting in touch with volunteers is mainly based on design aspects of VIKI so it is good that you wrote that it was not clear for you.
Hopefully VIKI changes these aspects in the future to offer a better start for other beginners and makes it easier to become a part of the volunteer community.