After reading so many opinions these days and complaining about the negative effects myself, I personally came to the following conclusions and felt the need to come back with a summary of them. So, Viki, can consider this long message as a public feedback from me:
1. WHICH PROJECTS SHOULD NOT BE COUNTED
The following projects should not be counted: those that are not licensed, those that are not released, those used exclusively to train new volunteers. There may be others, but I think these are the most common cases.
1.1. Unlicensed projects: Of course, we have the possibility to ask the channel manager or Viki to remove us from the role we have, since the project is no longer licensed and we can no longer access it. However, I personally would not want to lose that project from my project history, especially the moderator role. Right now, the only solution is to remain just editor or subber, but the project will be gone from my moderator history.
1.2. Unreleased projects: Of course, we’re not talking about the ones that are going to be released in a few days. Here we are talking about the ones that were supposed to be released, but kept getting postponed, now ending up in a situation where the postponement is for an indefinite period, even years. Maybe you should upload content only when you are sure it will be released soon, or not count it until it is released. It’s like me charging a fee for a service I didn’t provide. It is not fair.
1.3. Projects used to train new volunteers: Here we have the category of projects offered to NSSA academies and the category of projects used by languages without academies within NSSA. For the first category, projects can already be put on a white list so that they are not counted. For the second category, you need to come up with a quick and real solution. It is entirely your fault for not wanting to develop the NSSA further by adding new academies. The NSSA coordinators have not been active for some time, and so the creation of new academies is prevented. Maybe it is time to change or add new NSSA coordinators with the power to create new academies.
Question of the day for you, Viki: why are episodes counted when they are uploaded to Viki, and not when they are released to all languages? There is no point in uploading episodes and counting them, if we have to wait from 4 to 7 months, even 9 months, even up to more than a year, to be able to translate them into our language.
2. ENGLISH TEAMS AND CHANNEL MANAGERS
You need to take measures regarding English teams (certain editors), and certain channel managers. Here we have several issues:
2.1. From my experience so far, I could observe that seggers teams, as well as English subbers, do not present problems in completing their work in a reasonable time in the project, in their vast majority. So we are somewhat ok with them.
2.2. However, the big problem comes when the English subbers finish their work, and the English editing team has to continue. I don’t think it is worth mentioning again all the cases presented these days, where some editors have gone way overboard with the time allocated to editing projects. Also, I think you have been receiving complaints on this issue over the years. So, what do we do about the English language editorial teams? There aren’t many, so we need to keep and encourage the current ones, but we also need to find the right measures so that they don’t hinder the release of projects into all languages unnecessarily.
2.3. Irresponsible channel managers: Here we are talking about those who accept without any problem that their editorial teams are working at a infernally slow pace compared to the size of the project. Why don’t channel managers have the courage to impose a certain pace of work? Why don’t channel managers take the decision to change some editors when there are complaints about the very slow pace of episode releases? Should we have a more detailed guide for channel managers? Should we increase the importance of the channel manager role? Maybe then there won’t be people who disregard this role, and will follow the channel manager’s guidelines for the project.
3. ABANDONING PROJECTS
Temporary moderators - I think that’s what we’ll call the category of people who will take on projects, start them, but abandon them as soon as new ones are released. So you definitely should not let these moderators out of your attention. There are two approaches here.
3.1. Sanctioning at a certain number of abandoned projects, with a ban on moderating for a certain period. Of course, after analysing the reasons for abandoning a project.
3.2. Or, as someone said in another topic, you could create tiers of rewards for moderators who complete each moderated project. Rewards can be of many kinds: special badges, special statuses, maybe even an extra slot as long as there is no unjustified withdrawal in the moderator’s history, etc. Of course, this does not assume that projects will be completed with a decent quality. As it hasn’t happened so far, quality is not an important issue for you.
4. QUALITY ON NATIVE LANGUAGE - SLOWLY DYING, AND YOU STILL DON’T GIVE AN ANSWER ON THIS!!!
As stated since the first reply to this topic, I do not agree with the CURRENT FORM of these requirements. So, to some extent I understand the need to have a limit. However, these new requirements TOTALLY EXCLUDE quality. What can you do about this? Well, you can do this:
4.1. Introduce mandatory graduation from the NSSA subbing academy. Of course, for languages without an academy you will have to get to work and create academies for them. Obviously, this will not guarantee full responsibility from moderators, but it will be a big step towards better quality.
4.2. It is more complex and probably more expensive, but introducing native staff for each language could be another solution. The fact that someone speaks and/or writes English very well can in no way guarantee that that person has an almost flawless knowledge of the native language.
5. IF YOU ARE CONSIDERING REVISING THESE REQUIREMENTS
What I think you should consider in case of changes to these requirements:
5.1. Quality - Any changes you want to make should be based on quality in the native language.
5.2. Time per volunteer - Not all volunteers can spend the same amount of time working on Viki. Why not give a little extra chance to those who can be more active, to actually be more active.
5.3. Pace of rolling out projects to other languages - I have already said all I need to on this subject.
6. MY CONCLUSIONS
After more than a year of being on Viki, I can say without hesitation that the direction of Viki is more financially and commercially oriented, rather than a solid and responsible community.
Native language quality is not important to you. Although it is already quite clear that the majority of responsible volunteers repeatedly draw your attention to this.
You take almost no notice of the feedback we give you. For God’s sake, it’s 2022 and we have to use that Inbox? No real time sending/receiving, no quick search, no conversation categorization function, no ability to delete/add members from/in a conversation, no ability to send pictures and videos, no phone app, plus much more.
However, the fact that recently some of your staff decided to join the Discord server created and maintained by this wonderful community, gives me a little more hope that maybe you will change your approach towards us. Hopefully we won’t have to wait years… Also, let’s hope that the reason for joining is not entirely different, in a negative sense.
Sorry for this long post, and maybe repetitive on some aspects, but I felt the need to do it.