I think its really useful for teaching. Everything is right where you want it. As for the volunteer process… i dont know if it’s feasible to move an entire team there because we have a wide range of ages working with us(took me quite a while to get used to the platform - i felt like a lost little rabbit for a few weeks after joining even though I usually get the hang of most sites in a day or two), and not everyone wants to create a Discord account. I won’t think of it as a place we all have to shift to, more as a useful option when considering where to host our team chats.
I also think it’s best for picking newbies because you can gain an understanding of whether they’re ready for a certain job by engaging in conversation with them.
I don’t know which message tools the OL teams are using. I think some use Skype, some Discord, some WhatsApp? Who knows…
So my impression of past years was that the biggest issue for beginners has been the question how to get in touch with moderators because not everyone finds the way to discussion board and I don’t see how an inofficial message app could solve this problem.
Other communities, including game studios, are way better in providing informations even when most gamers might be more used to find necessary informations than someone who’s just into watching dramas and maybe doesn’t even know at the beginning that Viki is fan translated.
If the project finder tool would give information and direct links to helpful threads and Viki guidelines or even Discord community servers, that’ll be a great option. I think some years ago the volunteers suggested that. I guess the project finder is still very similar to the past (besides the option that mods now can disable their projects from being listed).
I think the entire problem is the stupid Project Finder. Instead of asking everyone to hide their teams, they could have removed all projects and just kept the On-Air ones. CMs who needed volunteers could have done things the old way and finished the non-On Air projects. That way, we could start fresh and not have old or abandoned projects clogging up the PF.
I agree that they should provide links to Discussions too… but i think that option is there in the Contributor Community menu. Objectively speaking, it’s not very hard to get in touch with a mod. You can do that straight from a channel page’s Subtitle Team, too. Isn’t that how complainers end up in everyone’s inboxes? However, I do agree that Viki needs to do something about breaking the wall between the volunteers and newbie viewers. Changing the tagline from “Global community powered by fans” to “The heart of Asian entertainment” was a pretty stupid decision, in my opinion. I got curious about volunteering after seeing that.
I think Discord is better than WhatsApp and some other sites because you don’t have to share your personal phone number.
I’m back! As I’ve always been a supporter of change for the better, I think that in terms of communication platform, Viki has fallen behind.
I’m glad to see that after me there were more determined volunteers who persisted in creating a Discord server (Viki, are you here? Discord is the perfect tool that is not only used in gaming anymore. So maybe follow up on our idea).
To the rest of the community, which is sceptical about taking a new approach, I recommend that you give the two Discord servers a try, especially the one for the volunteer community. We have already started to gather more and more people and you will certainly have the support you need to learn how to use Discord, which is by far more in line with our work and the year we live in, 2022. Refreshing the webpage to see new messages seems unthinkable to me. I don’t know what Viki’s IT department is doing.
Personally, I updated my Viki profile and included the two servers with links to them. If you want to support these servers, I recommend you do the same.
Life is about trying and discovering new things, why not apply that here? It costs us nothing.
I personally don’t feel good about this either… although our German community uses Kakao Talk for Project Announcements and volunteers seeking projects including a chat for each project and there is Viki/News, it’s for faster communication since the mailsystem here isn’t that great. I believe there is also Googlechat or something for the English teams, perhaps not all. This is just enough to keep pace, but another platform for volunteers and newbies feels somewhat risky as not all volunteers and newbies will get the same information… it looks indeed like a division…
The numbers that are there says really nothing.
It should also be noted that the “Viki contributors community” on Discord you created should be labeled as Unofficial since Viki has no part of it, it could confuse Newbies and other volunteers…
IDK why you seem too serious&negative about it, as it was explained on a previous post there is no splitting the community, its the opposite. You cant go around and ask people who create watch party thru Viki, Netflix and etc and have social chats what they are doing? Its not my business nor yours, i dont think anyone got a say if someone wants to socialise, which is what Drama Lovers server is for.
I personally find Discord much useful and seems like there are 120 other people thinking this way…Nobody forces any teammates to join and use discord, its simply makes the lives easier, like for example our Segmenter Sensei’s been telling they think it makes their job easier to teach their students. I dont think there is any information newbies or volunteers are getting when they join Viki. Many of us were lost and didnt know how to contact people to volunteer. Now we got a platform to help one another and explain things better. Like…we all admit Viki inbox is not useful a bit. German community must have thought so too, so that they created Kakao Talk, but Discord is just more useful for group projects. As I said, its only open to those who wants to join haha.
Numbers does not matter as I said, even helping one person is good enough for me. But it does say something that we had 60 people 3-4 days ago and now we got 120. People seem to find it helpful so they invite their fellow volunteers.
Viki Volunteer Community is not official already. Its a community…not an official organisation. I’ve read Viki regulations and ToS and our server does not do anything against it, name included. Thank you for your concern. It would help if you could break your prejudice and spread less negativity…Also there is no official Viki server anyway so what is there to be confused lol
I was sceptical about Discord just as you. But so many things changed my mind.
The beauty of Discord is that it has everything you need all in one place. It is Discussions, Chat, Watch Party, Video tutorials, and Skype/Zoom all in one. Depending of the needs of a community, Discord can be tailored in almost any way possible.
Yes, I agree, we should perhaps consider adding the word “unofficial” in the title of that server. But as some have already said, there is nothing official or unofficial about any community anywhere. We as Viki community do not belong to Rakuten Viki as a company. We have the right to self-determination and self-organization.
"Hi guys, hope you are all fine! I thought it may be nice to sum up all the updates happen during a week every Saturday!"
-There were many suggestions for language RSS, so we put up a #language-learning-resources room for anyone interested in.
-Added 3 new "Content From" countries and more languages in #roles & their respective general rooms, do not hesitate to ask for your language role if its not available yet
-Created a room for our #volunteer-podcast you can check the channel to see some of our volunteers organising a nice thing there!
[: We got a new channel for CM or Mods who want a private category for their active teams. For more detailed info please check the image (click on it and click to "see original" to see full sized image). #team-channel-request-from
Our member count went from 60-ish to 130 this week. Thank you all for making that happen and inviting people! You can invite your current teams, comment and increase the activity of our post on discussions to help us reach out to more volunteers!
"And finally...I know some of you are familiar with discord and some are not, as we grow in numbers we believe we will eventually require mode Discord Mods to be able to take care of the server properly. After I am done with all the paperwork and stuff Im currently busy with i will offer help to those who would want to learn discord and discord modding better, so let me know if you are interested in that too!
There’s one aspect I really dislike about Discord:
If you’re not online during a chat/conversation you’ll have to read tons of text that needs much of scrolling and is delayed in its visibility - while reading posts here in discussions, even when there are more new posts within a certain thread while being absent, is not painful.
So being in multiple Discord servers for different communitys (it’s standard for many gaming communitys) only causes me to not read most stuff there, except info/announcements without following discussion posts.
Another aspect is that if a certain post in Discord is not pinned and might be interesting/“important” within a discussion it’s too hard to find while a post here in discussions can be easily found because the structure is much clearer and sorted.
Discord is very bugged recently. It does not show new messages… Icons are missing and/or font for new messages does not change.
Sometimes I didn’t notice new messages for couple of days because of that plus during past week/s Discord was broken, either with not showing anything and/or with showing channels but without option to post anything.
That happened to many people of my community, who live at different places.
It seems that Discord is unable to handle the amount of servers properly now because in the past it worked fine, sometimes even more reliable than Skype.
Yes, it is verryyy easy to get dragged into reading lots and missing lots, so in order to minimise that we tried to separate rooms as much as possible like images in another channel to not to spam, kept community related chat and chit chat separated as well as suggestions, and we try to encourage people to use “reply” or @ if they need someones attention. One good thing i realised discord has now is the temporary threads, so when speaking about a topic for a short while but want to keep track of it, we can create those and people can follow up without distractions!
And dont worry, we try to make sure we announce importart stuff in announcement rooms and sum up all the Viki/Discord related updates every Saturday. We are open to any suggestions to make things easier for the community!
