Dear Community,
It’s been a whirlwind for everyone and the world at large, and we hope you are holding up well in these precarious times. At Viki, it is our privilege to continue bringing the community forward with site and tools improvements.
Since the launch of the new inbox, the Community team has reviewed all of the feedback, sentiments, and issues you shared.
Bugs
Our dedicated engineers have worked tirelessly to resolve most issues that made the inbox seem buggy — if you have reached out to us separately about it, you should have received a response by now. (If you haven’t gotten a reply, please write a response on the same ticket and we will get to you very soon.)
Feedback and further improvements
The team reviewed and evaluated each piece of feedback objectively and with care. While we are unable to address each of them immediately, we did manage to roll out some quick fixes that could reduce some of your pain points, as well as commit ourselves to deliver other changes — based on your feedback — within the next few weeks.
Read on to find out more.
- What changed since the launch of the new inbox?
1. Reinstatement of the envelope icon on user profile page
We heard you! We understood that this is a small but critical feature that could save you a lot of time, so we brought back the envelope icon so you can directly send a message to another volunteer from their profile page.
2. Clearer distinction between “Read” and “Unread” (Bold vs unbold)
While threads with unread messages were indicated with a tiny blue dot on the right, we found out that having bold texts for both unread and read threads was confusing for you. And so we fixed that! Now only threads with unread messages will be in bold (we kept the tiny blue dot), while threads that have no new messages will be unbolded.
3. New shortcut to send a private message to someone from the group chat
Try typing “/who” in any of your group chats, then click Enter. Now hover over the username of any participants.
At any time you need to take a discussion from group to private, this is how you can do so moving forward!
4. Link to user profile from icon
Missing from before, you can now click on the profile icon of any user within a message thread and be brought to their Viki profile page. We recognized how important it is for you since some of you receive a ton of messages daily but might not remember everyone.
5. Colors of inbox in dark mode
Previously, when in dark mode, the color of the text box of sent messages was in a striking shade of purple, which caused discomfort for some of you. To ease this, we changed it to a darker shade of purple to reduce color contrast.
6. Easier-to-read texts
Some of you mentioned that you were having a difficult time reading your messages because the texts were too compact and condensed. Reading messages in the Viki inbox shouldn’t be straining, and hence we increased the space between each line of text to make messages easily readable.
- What is in the works?
As mentioned before, we are unable to work on all of your feedback immediately, but we have committed ourselves to deliver improvements in stages - some of them within the next few weeks:
1. Addressing the “Enter to send” function
Many community members have mentioned that they are not used to this action, while others have found their way around it. We will be expanding on this function so that both camps can continue to send messages in their own preferred ways.
2. Adding multiple recipients to group chats via comma
You liked this so we are bringing it back in the best form we can.
3. Locating your sent messages
It is not an outbox, or a “Sent messages” folder, but we will be assisting you to locate what you have sent to other community members.
4. Ability to disable replies in group chats
We understand that group chats are most useful when a Channel Manager or Moderator is relaying an instruction to the rest of the team members, and having replies really just makes the important instructional message so easily missed!
To fix that, we will be introducing a feature to disable replies for such message threads, keep what is important only.
5. More options for message display
There is no one size fits all so we will be giving you the option to view messages in the font size you prefer.
6. Better email notifications
Current issues with email notifications for inbox aside, if you are one to enable email notifications for new messages in your inbox, you can expect to see the subject line of your inbox message included in the email notifications. We do not have this at the moment, but we know how confusing it can be to receive an email with no context. So stay tuned!
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If you do not see your feedback mentioned anywhere, it is not that they are not considered; we are phasing our improvements to inbox so that our team can continue to work on other aspects of the Community to enhance your experience as a whole.
We strongly encourage you to keep using the inbox so you can get used to it, and more importantly, let us know what is wrong and/or what you want to see. Keep talking to us!
Finally, we hope Viki has been a source of distraction for you during this time. Please continue to be kind to one another and stay safe.
Take care,
Viki Community Team
