As of today, the Bio feature will be suspended on all accounts. This means the personal information you input to the settings page will not be visible on your profile to other users. Although the suspension of this feature won’t have any impact on your learning, we want to share the circumstances that led to this decision, and what it means for the future of social features on Memrise.
What happened?
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We recently discovered a number of users had been using the same username and password for their Memrise account as for other web services.
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One or more of these other web services had a security breach, meaning that spammers were able to access their Memrise accounts and alter the information in their bios.
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See: http://community.memrise.com/t/spambot-accounts - for examples.
What has been done?
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To safeguard the affected accounts we proceeded to remove all inappropriate content from the bios and initiated a process to reset all login details. The affected users have also been sent a notification with instructions to reset their passwords.
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We have also put in place new spam detection tool that will allow us to identify suspicious activity in the future.
So why are the bios being suspended?
As an extra step (to avoid further abuse of the Bio field) we are placing it under temporary suspension as of today. This will allow us to think through how this social feature has worked for our users and make a plan to change and/or improve it.
Apologies for any inconvenience this has caused.