Indeed, it’s an unofficial very experienced team member. No one told me, but it was obvious when MK “reminded” me what I should do next and then what after that. I think Viki assigns them to new CMs so things don’t crash and burn 
Exactly. Those I call the unofficial mentors. Sometimes the Chief segmenter, as well.
And some hard-core complainers complain even before they are rejected. “I know you are thinking of giving the mod position to that person, but let me tell you…”
I’m pretty sure Viki does not “assign” them, but they probably hope someone in the team will step up to fulfil the role.
For me it seemed a bit too coincidental that within the hour of being informed to be a CM, this person contacted me with clear agenda what she needs to inform me about. Almost like following a protocol.
Interesting. I have no such experience. On my first time as CM, the main help came from someone I had assigned to the team myself. And in the times that I took on this “mentor” role myself, it was not because anyone had instructed me to do so.
Indeed, I mean there are people rather going for certain genres, but some do everything as well (like me 
). Some developments might be a result of the fact that some people only ever go for certain genres, and therefore often have an amount of projects that increases their chance to be chosen.
I’ve seen CMs who didn’t know what a TE is after their 3rd time (and it wasn’t years ago either, but this year). I’ve seen CMs delaying their projects by insisting on “announcing every release themselves, even if it’s over a week after the final edit”. They were rewarded with another channel while they didn’t finish their first project of 24 episodes within 7 months.
I have the feeling that CMs rather avoid a confrontation, even if it might be inevitable given the circumstances. On one hand I can understand that sort of behavior, on the other hand I consider it part of their job to ensure that their project gets finished within a proper timeframe.
There are projects from 2020 only finished recently after 40 episodes and these people receive another project and managed to release 20 episodes in 4 months. Maybe it’s difficult with some languages, and Viki mainly assists in case of Korean dramas, but I don’t think they ever considered trying to find, e.g., more editors. This won’t change either if they’re encouraged like that.
Furthermore, especially OL moderators sometimes don’t know as much about how the English team etc. works. However, most of our subtitlers who never moderate know even less about it. I never cared about it in the year before, either. You may only start caring once you want to manage your team and release the episodes.
In the end, the main thing for both Viki and most contributors is the amount of projects. So, if you have 20 projects and another trustworthy applicant has one, your application usually doesn’t matter. But sometimes people who keep on being rejected send you applications containing 1-3 standard sentences. When I read these I don’t feel motivated either. More like I’m one of the 20 projects they applied to today. Maybe they exactly did that, but I think it’s better to show some basic motivation for a project (though I sometimes wonder about that as well, lol).
You have to agree that this is a rare case. I honestly think that volunteers should go through sub/seg level to Mod level to CM level. At least they’ll learn more if they’re under a good CM or working with other experienced Mods. I wouldn’t see it as a bad thing if Viki allows only those who have had experience as Mods to become CMs.
Like @xylune said, I have also met CMs who had no idea what a GE or TE is. I had to spend some time going back and forth with them until they just handed me over to the Mod. There are some CMs who know they don’t know everything and tell you right away that they’re working closely with a Mod. But there are some with whom you have to spend lots of time in confusion before they point you to a Mod.
Perhaps they considered me more incompetent
The most important step to any new “job” is being aware of how much you don’t know. So that you can get guidance in time. There is always someone who can help.
Hi everyone!
Gosh, I have so much to say after reading this whole topic. But I will try to be as general as possible. Not to say otherwise, but I don’t want to stir up a storm in my community, which is already a bit troubled.
I started volunteering in February this year. Fortunately for me, and for my community, I was lucky enough to start under the guidance of an academy sensei.
From around April I started applying for the role of moderator, starting with a number of abandoned projects that had yet to be translated, very slightly, into my language. I can say I’ve had almost only pleasant experiences.
Since I chose to translate only with other volunteers, and not alone, I got to know my community quite quickly. I have now centralised over 140 volunteers with notes on them. It makes my work much easier. In addition, it makes it much easier for me to spot those who practice very frequent username changes.
I’ve had a lot of good and not so good experiences. All of these have messed up my expectations and what I imagined my community to look like. Which has led me to do what I can to improve my community. That’s while I’m still waiting for Viki to respond to some of my queries… You know what I mean…
Now, on a general level, I don’t have much to point out, given that I recently got my first project as a channel manager.
Yes, it’s very hard as a channel manager to determine who is best suited for the moderator role. Personally, I look at the total number of subtitles, the number of subtitles per project (there are many who just want to be moderators, and translate others for them), if they have any connections with the academy coordinators (so I can ask for feedback from them), if they have been moderators on the same projects I have been on (this helps me make a decision much faster). If it’s a volunteer just starting out for the moderator role, I prefer to only add him/her together with another experienced volunteer.
Being my first experience as a channel manager, I can say that everything is going smoothly. I have received a number of requests to translate to this project, but all have been volunteers with zero contributions, therefore I have redirected them to this forum, to the topic for newbies.
Now, if I think about how Viki chooses who to appoint as channel manager… God, this is a disaster. In the last few months I’'ve seen everything that could be worse. So, I conclude that Viki is going strictly on the idea of giving everyone a chance. Viki probably forgets that it’s a partially free steaming platform. I mean, there are still people who pay a subscription and expect something decent, common sense. Yes, I know everyone deserves a chance, but let’s give it to those responsible. They, in turn, will have a chance to help others. As I was…
If Viki wants so badly to give everyone a chance, then should provide us with ways to combat totally irresponsible volunteers. And “thank goodness” we have no shortage of them.
Now, at the local level, I understand and relate to so many of the situations you present. My community is struggling with an extremely unpleasant situation. In order not to spark any more discussions on top of the existing ones, I can only say that whenever I am asked for help related to my community, I am here. For everything.
My community is a relatively small one. Around 150 volunteers, of which there are constantly less than 100 active. Of these, there are around 20 moderators, of which only around 10 are more or less active. What about quality? About 7-10. To sum up, my community is 100% among those where there are only a few moderators with a lot of projects, but unfortunately, some of them are totally irresponsible.
We have moderators who translate alone, moderators who forget about projects but apply for new ones, moderators who only encourage those with serious grammar and language problems (that’s the only way they can get projects easier), moderators who translate in a small group but in a few years (they also run out of project licenses and they don’t finish translating). We have everything in our community.
Although we have a number of very good subtitlers, they don’t want to become moderators as well. This leads to an increasing presence of moderators with serious problems. Personally, I offer my help to all volunteers who want to leave behind something of quality, of common sense. I even have one such volunteer, who after a few projects moderated with me, has now got her first projects on her own. Of course, she still has my full support when she asks for it.
As I said in another thread (the one about moderators with many projects), the main problem on Viki at the moment is the ease with which anyone can get into the moderator role and, it seems, the channel manager role as well.
Looking at it from another perspective, it’s a difficult situation for Viki to address as well. But, as life teaches us, every problem has at least one solution. There just needs to be a willingness to have constructive discussions that lead to a concrete outcome. In this area, I think Viki has a problem. If you consider yourself a volunteer-based platform, then you need to listen and respond 24/7 to the community that helps you exist… for the most part.
Gosh, I haven’t written this much on the forum in a long time… 
And as usual, I hope I’m not upsetting anyone. 
I admit it’s difficult to choose someone. I can only speak for myself… but the amount of applications I got for my projects as a CM for Spanish and Portuguese are a lot. It’s really hard to choose. Fortunatelly, I’ve never received a message like that, but surely, I’d never choose someone who degrads someone’s else work. It just shows the immaturity and the ‘‘competition’’ that they think they are having. It’s not a competition getting projects as a moderator, so why all this hate?
Just send a message about yourself.
This I would call a medium-sized community. Croatian is a small community with about 10 volunteers at best.
Wow… Yeah, you’re right. I usually relate to larger, established communities.
The Dutch community has about 70 translators. Half of them having less than 10.000 subs and also half of them active (subbed within the last 3 months). So at most we have 30-40 translators we can ask at any time.
In the last two weeks, less than 50 have been active in our community… If I take into account certain sorting criteria, there are even fewer…
Thanks for bringing up this, too.
Usually, my name is listed as English Moderator or All Languages Moderator and I have 0 contributions for it as I only work as a cover designer. And I think some people misunderstood our role.
Maybe the one who was appointed as a CM should be let the members know that we only work as a designer. Also, didn’t remove us from the role, just in case, we need to do some revision or fix something on the cover or to add and delete a member that is listed on the cover design.
This would also be rude… you worked for it, and spent your time doing all those things (and it’s not easy). So removing you, wouldn’t be that nice from the CM.
I think removing one from the team is correct. You show up as “English moderator” with zero contributions, it doesn’t look good on your page, especially if it’s a lot of instances.
Your name and role is showing on the cover page, but a CM browsing through profile and contributions pages cannot be visiting each single drama like a detective.
Removing, of course only when the drama is done. Anyway, the part with team members is easily editable by the CM anyway, adding or substracting a name surely won’t ruin the overall design!
I was appointed as Timed Comments editor on a drama once, and when it was over, I had to write again and again to be removed, because I hated to see that “zero contributions” thingie on my project page.
If said CM browses through her profile, won’t he/she understand why there are 0 contributions if @jhnimm has a list of her Cover Designing projects in her About Me page? I checked it, and it might be better to put that section above all the other sections so it’s easily accessible/seen by a browsing CM…
She’s worked on a LOT of projects as Cover Designer. I think she should be shown as part of those teams.
This particular designer took the trouble to do this, but, unfortunately, not everybody makes such a list (or updates their About page regularly). See, as an example, the About page of justine_desmoulins, who is both a French moderator, a sensei at the French NSSA Subbing Academy and an awesome cover page designer. Look how beautiful and detailed her About page is. When you get to cover pages, she only has three (otherwise her About page would be interminable!)
Another example is josselinelino, a respected Spanish moderator, editor, segmenter and NSSA sensei. Nowadays she also enjoys making cover pages. Her About page looks wonderful too, she even has scrolling on it (how did you do that???) Still, although she mentions cover page in her introduction, there are no examples or list of her cover pages. If you go to her contributions page, there are some dramas with zero contributions and when I went to click on them one by one, I discovered that, although she was in the team as English moderator, in two of them she was only cover page designer.
You know how much time a CM has to waste by doing this on all the applicants for Spanish and Portuguese alone?
And even if the person diligently makes a list of all the projects where s/he did the cover page design, it is tiresome to go back and forth between the two pages (About and Overview, then another click to bring up Contributions) to match the cover page projects (or write them down somewhere and check them off one by one) in order to differentiate those from the real moderating projects.
I fully agree that cover page designing is an important contribution to the team, but calling it “moderation” can only bring confusion. Thus I am in favour of deleting the person from the team members when the drama is complete, while of course giving full credit and thanks on the cover page itself.
You know what would solve the problem? As Viki has created the “editor” role, they could also create the “cover page designer” role. For them it’s super-simple!
But since they have ZERO interest on cover pages (and have buried them where only persistent people an see them), it’s unlikely they do that.
Just want to share my activities at Viki.
I, subber, segmenter, editor, moderator, and lucky enough I’m not registered as a CM yet. And I am also registered as Moderator, Moderator of All Languages, or English Moderator, but my main role is segmenter.
When Viki decided to upload a pre sub video, the segmenter had to fix the segment before Team English did their duties.
Even though as a segmenter, the list of contributions for the segmenter is only 24 segments out of the 24 episodes we’ve worked on, ironic isn’t it?
I think we can’t just rely on the list of contributors to know how much this person contributed to the drama.
We can carefully consider that everyone is giving their best effort to contribute to the channel they have chosen, even if sometimes the outcome doesn’t end up as expected.
As for me, enjoying my me-time at Viki is a pleasant journey.
I believe this happens to you as well.
Actually, I didn’t mind when the CM choose to delete me from the moderator position when I finished the cover design for the channel. But it is also up to the CM whether to keep my position, just in case they need me to add or delete someone, or I need to do some changes.
So I think we should end the discussion about the cover design and leave it to the CM, to delete or to keep. I wrote about this before since someone also mentioned the position as a moderator but only do the cover. But to designs a channel is not zero contribution, although it is a small contributions. I worked as a CM for a few channels before, I will keep the person who did the design as to respect them for their work and acknowledge them that they’re the part of my team.
The main topic of the discussion is about the rookies and the fake accounts on Viki.
Let’s get back to the main topic.
Thank you!