They know…about the main website being down. I just messaged an overlord and they know.
Meanwhile, this seems to be working. It seems there is a SURVEY ABOUT THE MESSAGE BOX and well…here you go. Something to do besides try to find your messages!
Hello, first I hope all you and your families stay healthy!
Second, Viki told us they were going to actualize the inbox, but what they did, I don’t like it.
Because, we lost our privacy in the messages, my inbox is full all the time, and sometimes the conversations of the others users, make that the real (the GO) message get lost.
Sometimes we need just have a conversation with a just one users, about the same topic of the original message, so, now we have to created another message for talk about it, I think is double job.
And also, we can’t have a easy access to the profile of the user who send the messages (sender), and that will be stressful when we need to create a team for a project.
The best update that Viki could make to the old mail was, put a user search option, that is, that we could look for the user’s emails that we needed at the time.
I appreciate the interest of Viki for help to the volunteers, but in this case, I think that they failed.
I don’t need a chatter in the Inbox, and if they want to conserve it, please, give us the privacy, that we can only talk with the original sender and no with all the team.
I hope don’t perturb anyone, but I needed to vent.
Thanks.
I just try to finish the survey and I am kind of puzzled:
Is adding multiple recipients and/or creating a new message (group chat) not the same?
Sorting your messages, is that even possible?
Can we make a draft?
When I wanted to send a PM later, I sometimes wrote out a first draft and sent it to me, that is no longer possible any other way? Do you mean something else with “draft”? @jeslynl
Let’s summarize. Friends, if you can think of something else I didn’t include, please tell me and I’ll add it. Of course this is my personal view, you may not agree with some:
WHAT I LIKE
The fact that group messages one sends to team members from the project’s “Manage” page are grouped into one to three messages and don’t appear as individual messages in your messaging space: so you don’t have to delete 100 single messages in batches of 20 to get rid of all of them.
The fact that the messages have actual dates instead of “days/months/years ago”.
That there finally is some sort of sorting, although VERY limited.
That you can mark a message as unread. Not essential, but nice. I would like the read messages to be un-bolded, though.
That you can have a conversation with several people about a single topic.
Message subject is a nice feature (but it’s pretty useless if you cannot sort by subject)
That when you view all the participants of a conversation, you have the option of sending a personal message to any of them by clicking on the little envelope. (However it’s a new message, not including the previous conversation)
WHAT I DISLIKE
Because of the preview pane and of the excessive space between message headers, very few messages are visible, making it difficult to find a slightly older message. Which for us may mean today’s, because if you just became moderator or CM, you may get 20 new messages in one day.
Mass deleting messages is impossible now. You cannot select different messages and then click “Delete” as you could before. You have to do it one by one. And even that needs two clicks. No little bin or other delete button easy to click near the message.
It’s not obvious which messages are group chat and which ones are private. You might get into lots of trouble if you don’t pay enough attention, sending personal things and everybody reading them.
3a Even if you know that it’s a group message, there’s no way to send a private response. You can write a new private message if you click on “See all members” and then on the little envelope near the person’s name. But it is a brand new private message. You lose the original message the sender wrote so you won’t have an overview of the whole conversation with him/her. You sometimes need to see the points the other person has made to answer them one by one. And you both want a record of the previous things said in the conversation. To circumvent that, you have to copy the original message in the Clipboard (or copy paste it in a separate text editor) and then paste it in your new private message with the words “you wrote:”. Which is a hassle.
Username validation is completely useless. If the username you wrote on the “to” field was not correct, the old inbox told you so. Most of the time it is correct, though so we don’t need an extra step.
You can’t send a message to many people by just writing all the names together, separated by commas. This sucks! I have a saved list of good subbers whom I ask first if they want to translate, and if I have a new project, I send a message to all of them. Now I have to add the names of twenty people one by one, and confirming each?
Announcements tab? Really? Viki announcements come rarely, compared to Notifications by channel managers. Like once or twice a month at most. Why waste a whole tab for them? We usually delete them after reading them. But notifications asking for help to request licence for a show, which are the most bothersome thing in our inbox, were best kept separate. You could put announcements and notifications together, if you want. Oh, hey, I just saw we cannot send notifications to channel fans anymore! Not even useful things about when the episode is airing or whether it’s been subbed already.
Deleting a message becomes laborious, with all the confirmation steps etc.
“To create a new line within a message and not send it yet, press “shift + enter” and continue writing your message”. Why add a new difficulty? Since there is a perfectly good “SEND” button?
Read messages are in bold, so they look unread. This convention is what we are used to from all other messaging programs, so it comes natural to us to think that bold = unread, not bold = read. Why have us learn another convention when we are used to that one for decades now? Unread message titles letters become blue if you manually mark them as unread - but not when you have just received them, (UPDATE: Since I wrote this, one of my new messages that just came was blue. But this wasn’t there before. And it only happened for one day, after that even new ones are just black. Are you working on it, was it a bug?).
Sent messages and received ones are mixed all together which makes it messy and difficult to understand.
The empty textbox in the middle with “Get chatty” is downright insulting. We use messaging not to chat but to discuss important issues on our projects. You could keep “Start a conversation”, which is more neutral and is appropriate both for casual users and for volunteers.
Messages take quite a bit to load.
The search for dramas on the message page is missing now. Probably because we are not on the viki page anymore, but on a separate website. But how difficult is putting a link? After all, on the Viki page there is a link to the inbox, no?
We cannot leave a chat or conversation while keeping the original message the CM sent. Leaving the conversation (not seeing everyone’s responses) can be done only by deleting the whole thing.
If you delete a message the sender (and everybody else, if it’s a group message) knows it. It shows as “left the conversation”. It sometimes looks a bit rude. I want to be the only one to know whether I have deleted a message or not.
There is no easy way of accessing older messages. You can only reverse the order to put older first, but this may mean years ago. If you just want to find a message from a week ago, you have to scroll interminably. I know you will put a “Search” feature, but sometimes you don’t remember the exact username of the person nor the subject line.
Even scrolling through the messages is problematic. This may be a temporary bug, but I cannot scroll past the end of my window.
The e-mail icon for direct messaging on viki members profile has gone! Now we have to manually copy-paste the username in making a new message, when before it was automatic. This is going back instead of forwards. [UPDATE: It’s come back. Good!]
The sender’s name is not a link to their page anymore. [UPDATE: It’s come back. Good!]
HOW TO IMPROVE
Get rid of the preview pane. Only when you click on a message header you can see it. And get rid of the insulting “Get chatty” thingie. Just keep “Start a conversation”.
Make spacing between headers as narrow a Dina Talaat Interview Parts possible, so that the maximum number of messages can appear in one page. If you don’t have the preview pane, the sender, subject and date can fit in one line so this by itself will help a lot.
Get rid of the user icon, it takes up space. And no need to add all the participants near the subject. Just the first sender. We can see the participants once we click on the message.
All this will save lots of space. The goal being to be able to see at least 20 messages on a laptop or desktop screen.
4… Make mass selecting and mass deleting of messages easy and quick.
Make deleting a single message a one-click business
Make it easy to differentiate between personal and group messages, received and sent. Maybe different tabs?
Get rid of two-step username validation.
Bring back the possibility to write many usernames at once, separated by a comma
Get rid of the Announcements tab. Or make an Announcements/Notifications tab. That is, IF Notifications are enabled again. I would just put tabs for Personal - Group - or Received/Sent.
Make a good, comprehensive sorting method. By date (ascending, descending), by sender, by subject
Find a way to answer privately to the original sender of a group message. For instance: REPLY (by default, only to the sender) and REPLY ALL (to all the group). It’s not my original idea, Outlook Express already had this.
Disable “ENTER” sending the message. Just keep the “Send” button as is.
Fix the long loading times. How come this problem wasn’t here before?
Put a link to the drama search on top of the page. It’s not difficult.
Make unread messages bold and read messages not bold. The sender name and the date is in smaller font and grey colour, so it is already distinguishable from the message subject. If you like the blue that much, okay, than make the unread ones blue right away, not only when we manually mark them as “unread”.
Give us pages of messages, as we had, instead of only a Search feature, so that we can easily go to messages from a few days or weeks ago.
Folders (as you promised) so that we can sort by project or by groups of people (i.e. Italian subbers, Ko-En subbers, Moderators, Channel Managers, friends or whatever)
Search feature (as you promised)
html (I think you said it will be done in the future)
Bring back the e-mail icon for direct messaging on viki members profile. [UPDATE: I see this has been put back. Good!]
21 Bring back quick access to sender’s profile page just by clicking the username on the message. [UPDATE: I see this has been put back. Good!]
(I also made a post in Help Center “Viki Ideas”, but it’s still pending approval)
I agree. It’s absolutely confusing. I want to see if the e-mail is sent or received. It was hard to understand if the PM was read or unread. I’m disappointed.
Excellently expressed, @irmar, I agree with everything!
Also, I am not getting any e-mail notifications when I’ve received a new message, but I did manually turn notifications “on”. Probably a bug, but one that needs fixing very soon!
Plus, when I’ve read my “new messages”, the red dot on the home page telling me I’ve got new messages won’t dissapear until I refresh the page as it’s not updating in real time. Seriously, that is a step backwards.
Perfectly summarized Irmar!! Thank you!! I agree with you completely!! We need a system that will make our work easier and not something as complicated as this… I think we have enough with the crisis we are all facing at the moment outside Viki…
Completely agree with everything you’ve written. Aside that it’s a new tool that we aren’t accustomed with, it’s really hard to work with the new inbox.
I agree and add: Please do Let us use HTML code back again!! We Loved to embed pics in our messages (alone or with links included in the code) and we can’t do that now :((
It’s way tooo frustrating!! Images are Essential to make Viki cheerful and to boost our team’s energy and motivation!!!
It’s very gray and plain, at the moment, with these new changes.
I think they said that there’s not html “for now”, meaning that they are thinking of implementing it. That’s why I did not mention it.
That goes without saying, that removing html is also a downgrade!
Something to do besides try to find your messages!
and very disappointed me 
. I hope honest improvements from Viki 
Thank you, dear
So the next one will definitely be worse. Don’t you agree with me?!!!