Hello, everyone. I’m having an issue where the auto-ignore function under the options menu isn’t showing up on any of the courses I am taking. The other options are visible, but auto-ignore is gone.
Screenshot http://imgur.com/5R2hkoz
Username: c—5
Platform: web. Internet explorer
Date of first occurrence: 5-18-2016
Frequency of occurrence: Every time
Steps took when issue happened: Tried refreshing and looking at other courses.
@C_5, The auto-ignore tool was taken down a couple of months ago. There was no official explanation but there was some discussion on the old forum. I think the reason was that the tool wasn’t working properly for some languages with complex alphabets or symbols.
Let’s hope they find a fix soon. Until then, we can only ignore items individually via the Level page. 
Thanks for that @alanh, I noticed the “auto-ignore” didn’t work recently, the first time I actually wanted to use it.
However, I was always a little sceptical how it would work and if it would be over-zealous, so no loss really - it’s easy enough to ignore as one goes along. And sometimes the extra learning is a good revision.
In non-language courses there is often a different definition which would be useful to know, so that’s why I haven’t used it before.
For languages the tool was sometimes essential. It didn’t work if the match was not completely exact, but I learned the HSK courses from 1 to 4 and without auto-ignore I would have had to click through thousand items to ignore them manually. When I started learning for HSK 5 one day, I would have to ignore manually or relearn around 2500 items I already learned 
@junijuli93 and others, with a bit of work this might work: http://web.archive.org/web/20160528193148/http://www.memrise.com/course/984/hsk-level-4/thread/1779663/
The auto-ignore feature was DELETED by Memrise. View this old thread to know more:
Oh man, I really hope this feature is coming back. It’s not only super helpful, but also a confidence booster when starting a new course, clicking “auto-ignore” and then seeing the words in the new course go down significantly.
Not even sure I can start HSK5 without this!
The absence of the auto-ignore function is what is keeping me away from Memrise as a returning user.
I am a long time user (2011). As a Chinese learner, I deem auto-ignore was ESSENTIAL to use the HSK courses (those designed by benWhately), where each course contains items included in previous levels.
We are talking courses with thousands of elements here.
My example: I have already learned items in HSK 1-2 (in memrise) and HSK 3-4 (on my own). I want to come back to Memrise and pickup HSK 5, which sadly contains a lot of elements of HSK 1-2-3-4.
Without the automatic ignore function, I run into hundreds of unnecessary entries.
HSK 4 has 4100 items, let’s say I need to ignore 1000 or more items. I have two alternatives:
Let’s do the maths:
1400 clicks >> Keeps me away from starting this course (and thus from Memrise).
I understand they took down this function because it was not working. That is fine. But this choice makes sense only if it comes with a total re-design the HSK courses, bulding them as separated sets.
With nested courses (i.e. the current HSK sets) the system is basically unusable for advanced user.
I speculate this maybe of no interest to fresh users who start a language from scratch (maybe this is the target market for this website), but as an advanced user I feel no impulse whatsoever to come back here.
which is sad because the memorizing process (mems+characters) worked really good for me a long time ago.
This may be of use to those interesting in ignoring words:
Is there any chance of auto-ignore coming back? Or can we finally get the explanation of why it’s gone?
I think"we" got an explanation (comprising the usual points): 1. few users used it, or even realised that existed as a feature; 2 was eating up too much resources; 3 items did not coincide (from one course to the other,) although etc
Somebody did explain something at the time … 
That’s a shame they removed it - I went through all my courses and made sure that similar words were identical, and similarly that mine were identical to another large and popular course within the same language, to make it easier for learners within the language. That was a lot of work, and it looked like they probably removed the feature not long after I had finished. I do like memrise, but they’ve made it progressively harder for me to provide a good experience to the users of my courses - which is why I’ve stopped maintaining them and don’t really engage with that side of the site anymore, when I used to spend many hours on improving my courses.