As I told you in our quick chat on Discord, I wasn't going to write something, because it might sound as heavy accusations, however I changed my mind, as it might be good in the end. I'm not going to name anyone, as it might have been random or someone is going through a lot (and even though it is not right, I understand that it might happen from time to time.) I have discussed my concerns with a CM, for what it's worth.

Communication

Our category lacks communication. Real communication. Except from the weekly reports, there is virtually nothing else. Yes, we may be writing reports with all our thoughts etc, however having constructive dialog -instead of sweeping our problems under the carpet- will have a positive outcome.

There may be things in motion in the background, but having updates (as the case has been in the past 10 days or so) is much better and helpful for all of us (we won't have to say the same things over and over again)

Category in general

Fact: Translations category is using a lot of VP (or at least, it was, before the change in the bot). Not even a single member of the category denies that. But there are a lot of ways this category can't work in the same way as (random name of category) "development". I'm saying this as I'm a contributor to both Translations (as a Translator/LM) and Development categories

A translation of a project happens once and it might not need more strings to be translated in the future.

Developing a project is a recurring work that may never end, but it doesn't mean that new strings will be added that might need translation.

And, as already stated by @scienceangel:

First thing that should be considered is limiting the number of people within each team, because if more languages will be added, and if every language can add as much people in their team as they want, this is the recipe for disaster.

There can be room only for the best from the best from the best.

It's simply not sustainable that some teams have more than 10 members, while some have 3 - 5.

Scoring and complaints

According to the statistics I'm gathering for the Greek team, our average score per contribution is over 70. And no, I'm not favoring anyone (at least not on purpose). Let's take one of my last contributions as an example (this one.)

How would you score it? (with the exception of "How would you rate the semantic accuracy of the translated text?" as you can't know my actual accuracy if you don't know Greek) It's not a rhetorical question, I'm actually waiting for replies saying their answers. I can handle constructive criticism (as far as I know at least 😂)

Thing is, there are complaints that the Greek team is scoring very high (without saying it's abuse on purpose or justified). And to be honest, while the specific contribution was actually of high difficulty, with the current questionnaire at least, I've asked @ruth-girl to mark it as average to lower my score by telling her it was actually (and I quote myself) not that difficult. And on the other hand, I've suggested to a translator of my team not to submit a contribution because their translation was very bad, and they shouldn't seek a reward, even after reviewing and correcting their work. But that's not my point and I'm not waiting to hear "Bravo" or "Congratulations!" for any of those points, it's just "αυτονόητο" as we say in Greece (meaning self-evident)

I can easily lower my score even more. By submitting crappy posts (on average I spend 20 minutes on each contribution post, and I would gladly stop doing that), crappier translations (it's actually very easy to do that). I can also remove points from the contributions I'm reviewing (which would be unfair for someone who invested a lot of time in researching and translating correctly) and there is one question on this:

Do we want quality or quantity? We can't have both, as we can't expect people to spend 3 hours to translate 1500 words, with next to perfect quality, another 30 minutes to create a great contribution post, only to get less than $50. The same amount of work in a translations office in Greece would get $100+, and in other countries even more. I'm not asking to have the same rate, it's impossible, but punishing translator X (who does a great job), just because translator Y (who didn't do as good of a job as X) didn't get an upvote (which won't happen, as at the current rate utopian is voting, all contributions are getting their incentives) is bad for everyone, as good translators will not show the same interest in the future, and even worse, they may abandon the category.

To end this section of my comment, I will gladly take penalties (i.e. lower the % of my upvotes for the next X contributions) if the score I've gotten in my contributions is higher than it should have been, and if I've favored anyone. With the information we have, I did what I thought best.

Autonomous category?

To conclude my wall of text, I've been thinking lately if it would be better to make the category autonomous, not related to the other categories. Yes, we might use all the VP utopian has, given the opportunity. So instead of causing issues to everyone else, wouldn't it be better if we had a different voting bot and community account? Having a seperate delegation on that would help all the categories (again, with the new voting logic there are no issues, but I'm saying this just for the heck of it).

Note #1: if you think an LM is favoring someone on his team, discuss it with one of the CMs or one of the DaVinci staff. I would love to know if you think I've favored someone on my team so hit me up on Discord to discuss this 😉 Communication is key to making everyone better.

Note #2: I'm not saying anything about the questionnaire, as we've already submitted our suggestions as a team in a post on our community account, and my comment is already too long. And I wasn't going to write something 😂