Bio field will be suspended starting today

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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?

  • We recently discovered a number of users had been using the same username and password for their Memrise account as for other web services.

  • 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.

  • See: http://community.memrise.com/t/spambot-accounts - for examples.

What has been done?

  • 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.

  • 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.

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Hi @MemriseMatty,

Just to seek clarification, for those of us who had ‘legitimate’ bio entries, has our bio content actually been “suspended” and therefore still available for reinstatement once you have decided how to prevent future abuse of this kind or has it been deleted and therefore lost to us?

Thanks

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Hi @alanh

Good question. At this time, the bios and data have been suspended, meaning the feature and entries still exist while we review the situation. Should this change (i.e. the entries / bio feature moves from suspended > to > deleted, or the suspension is lifted) we’ll be sure to update yourself and other users via this thread. I hope this helps.

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just another feature went down for good under the pretext of “spamming”? did the bios consume that much? I found rather fishy the sudden complaints about spamming/bot accounts, I wondered who orchestrated this … A learner does not really care about such stuff such as “bot” profiles, the users complaining about did not have very impressing learning pages… one lengthy complaint “owww our poor school children” even had no idea that the poor school children cannot receive messages from other memrisers while learning or similar… of course the messages that the kiddies (fictional?) never got had to have “obscene” content…

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The problem was very much real. I was followed by at least five of them, and each of them had hundreds of others that they were following. Considering that Memrise is trying to appeal to school classes these days, it’s perfectly understandable that they consider it to be inappropriate. Honestly, it would irritate me either way, because I’ve seen what can happen to websites when such behavior is left unchecked.

However, I really hope that this doesn’t end up being Memrise’s ‘solution’. The bios have always been a fun way for users to connect with each other, in a way; for everyone to introduce themselves and talk about what they’re using Memrise for, what they’re interested in learning, etc. Take that away, and Memrise feels a lot more lonely and isolated, at least to me.

I’m all for a temporary lock on the feature if Memrise needs time to work out a solution to the spam accounts or maybe to see if they lose interest, but I will be very disappointed if it ends up being a permanent change.

A captcha added to the account creation page has been suggested before, but I thought it’d be worth bringing up again. I know they aren’t perfect, but it could at least impede the creation of spam accounts and hopefully make Memrise look like a less appealing site to target to the spammers. Others have suggested blocking certain regions, which I’m very much opposed to, but what about maybe setting some sort of limit on how many accounts could be created from a given region per day? Just an idea off the top of my head, admittedly, and it would of course only be relevant if Memrise was able to determine that the spammers were generally coming from the same area.

Edit: Another idea. Maybe we could take a page from the Discourse forums and make bios a ‘trust level’ type feature, where you can only use it after gaining x points, learning x items, etc. Again, not perfect, but it would be an extra step for the spammers, which could make it less appealing for them.

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Memrise, if you implement CAPTCHA’s, please make them accessible to those of us in China (i.e. not ReCaptcha).

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Thanks for your feedback. It’s worth noting you can still connect with others and introduce yourself via this forum. Your profile page has the option to enter some personal information, bio and details about what you are using Memrise for :slight_smile:

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@MemriseMatty

Why don’t you add a permanent “community profile” link to reach/follow community user profiles, for their same or different forum user account?

You could add it to the settings (including filter "http://community.memrise.com/u/…) , just like the bio, or, you could even AUTO-ADD the “community URL profile”, if a user has setup a community user.
The latter is the preferred way, that URLs get auto added, but you programmer team must have the control to sync two independent systems.
A user would be able to activate/disable the community user link in his settings.

Sometimes I find interesting user profiles from my Portuguese courses (course dashboards) and it would be great help if I could follow them here on the forums without having to do it all manually.
Personally I am using the same user accounts, others might prefer different accounts.

The reverse is already possible: I can add a “website” to my community user account, so people here can follow me back on my real Memrise account.by a single click.

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I don’t see the logic of suspending the regular bio field, but keeping the community profile bio.

What prevents the spammers from adding unwanted links to their community profiles? And what prevents the Memrise bosses from eliminating the community bio field too, once the spammers start using it?

It seems fairly obvious to me that Memrise doesn’t want to encourage community interaction among users, and will gradually tear it all down eventually, with or without an excuse.

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oh, and also this after this month i will cancel my pro account. i stopped rec memrise since a few month ago. you do not deserve to be promoted…

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I feel this is a sad move:

1) I use it to advise people of my interests (hence which courses they will find me supporting).

2) It’s where I advertise the link to my starter page here, so that users can come to the community for help and support on the many courses I support - often where the creator no longer has any interest in the course.

(Other people have given a link to a web site where they prefer to offer support).

You may remember this was necessary because you haven’t give us extra space in course description nor a dedicated web link to the community field to advertise the [Course Forum]

Perhaps you would consider the latter request (extra space &/ or a URL field on each course, to the Community).

FOA @MemriseMatty @BeaTrisy @lurkmoophy ?

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I never really looked after who is following me or not, why should I??? (i suppose that there are many fake accounts or similar, so what?.. ) unless they come up into courses that I am interested in…

increasing the appeal to the non-paying pupils?

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Oh well, at least people will stop changing bios because of not logging out of accounts.

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@MemriseMatty: Does this security breach affect people who have log into Memrise using Facebook or Gmail account log-ins? I’m wondering if it would be a good idea to set up a separate Memrise account log in from either of those two but still keep my account info and courses the same. Can you advise as to whether that’s possible? Many thanks.

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