It looks like they plan to "outsource" it to Faceplant. In fact this isn't new as such; the "new" reference in the quote below notwithstanding, the Faceplant group has been running for 7 months now and I see some familiar avatars in the member list. However based on the newsletter that I received this morning it looks like it may become "the" Italki community once Beta stops being Beta.

There are a plethora of benefits connecting to learning a language within a community.

Mmm. Like learning that "plethora" is (not are) a singular noun, and that the use of "connecting" rather than "connected" in that sentence is a bit questionable. But that aside:

Check out the new official language learning facebook group of italki 'For the love of languages'. It aims to give enthusiastic language learners the opportunity to share knowledge, get language questions answered, and receive support and motivation while learning!

"Get language questions answered"; that does indeed sound familiar. It's fine for the Answers section (I suppose) but I don't know how well it will go for the Notebook section. Not well, I suspect. I can't abide Faceplant and am not on it, but I do use its sibling Workplace (formerly Facebook At Work) which is - how shall I put this - a sub-optimal piece of software trash. Even formatting a post is a painful experience. Do you want in line graphics? Harr-harr, it is to laff. With plain text it's passable.

> Group rules from the admins

This should be good.

No Self Promotion or Spam
Posts unrelated to language learning are considered as spam.

So, what, are you saying that some teachers SHOULDN'T post half a dozen "So what is your favourite yoghurt" posts to try to boost their visibility?

No Language Exchanges
Please don’t post any requests for language exchange partners

Wait, what? Let me read that again. {Blinks, looks at the list of Discussions thread titles...} BWAAA-HA-HA-HA! Yeah, good luck with that one, Sparky.

Let's be honest, Italki's only real concern is getting people to buy language lessons and skimming their commission from those. When they set the place up I suspect that they thought that having a Community section would lead to sales, but I doubt that it has really worked out that way. The return on investment just isn't there.

So assuming that they do shift everything to Faceplant, I will just say (in anticipation) to those who regularly make good posts (looks in Richard's direction) and to anyone whose Notebooks I've corrected over the last couple of years {cheery wave}... SEE YA!

So it appears that Italki has decided, after much lack of consultation, to force the New! (their punctuation) Italki Classroom down our throats for lessons. I just booked a new package and was given NO option to continue to use a system which was developed by professionals in the field of video conferencing, and will instead be expected to use one developed by people whose primary capability is throwing up a slow loading screen telling me that "Italki is changing the way the world learns!" and getting me to reenter my password every 2.5 minutes because they don't trust their own validation system. Well, the world learns how to design really bad websites, it DOES learn that much.

I had already contacted Italki Support when I read about the proposed Classroom in the Discussions group (given that Italki could not be bothered notifying users who would be affected by this or afford them any input into the process), and told them that I wanted no part of this. As far as I'm concerned this is just a grubby exercise in trying to control all student-teacher contact to lower the risk that someone, somewhere, might be stiffing them on the outrageous (in my opinion) 15% fee that they lop off the top for providing little more than a semi-decent booking service. I further told them that I had no faith in their ability to deliver a functioning video conference system given the state of their website in general and their flat out refusal to fix obvious issues in functionality (hellooo, Notebook). As usual, support paid lip service to how "we're really listening" and the development team went ahead and did whatever it felt like doing anyway, as is its way.

I swear, I am OVER this site. If my teachers were on any other site, I would be out of here so fast they would not see the dust. As it is, I want to be done with Italki anyway.