I think at this point the cheating has become so widespread that the leaderboards are essentially pointless. I would prefer disabling them, or at least having the option to disable them or block specific users that are obviously cheating.
Trying to get an idea of where you are on a course is pointless when people are hacking through two million points a day.
Not sure what the other learning sites are doing about similar issues, but this phenomenon has the potential to be a fatal flaw for the website. I can’t imagine ever renewing this service when the mems don’t work on the mobile app, the leaderboards are so inflated by cheaters as to be meaningless, and the ability to focus on trouble words is not available on the mobile app.
Basically, the site is very easy to manipulate by cheaters that have no interest in learning, and discouraging to use for people trying to master a new language. I am close to dropping this app altogether and going back to Ankii, which really sucks.
What is going on? How come things are such a mess? This place has so much potential.
I’ve been using Memrise daily for just about 4y now and I haven’t come across cheaters. Of course this doesn’t mean there are no cheaters, but you have to keep in mind that there are users who actually do spend loads of time learning, and this doesn’t necessarily mean they are cheating. I checked out the user that you mentioned on the other thread and I would think that the numbers are quite feasible with “honest work”.
Rather than disabling the leaderboards, just don’t look at them if it bothers you that much and you think many are cheating. Personally, I love them and find they are encouraging.
I get what you are saying. I used to love friendly competition with people on the same level of the same course as me, you know, getting another 7,000 points in late at night to beat them for “the week” or whatever. Then the million point trolls took over. Now I do not even look at the leader board. Do yourself a favour and just keep your own count for YOU to know a “personal best”. Feels good.
As a Creator of courses and Contributor (Custodian or Curator) of many, many more, I like the leader board to show me how popular a course is currently.
It helps me assess how much time I should give it looking after it or even adding to it.
It’s also good as an indicator of how popular a course is, when looking for another course to learn.
That user’s numbers (mkam745) were not feasible, they were using a bot. It’s not just the totals, it’s the rate at which they were gaining points. 20 million points in a month is not a realistic score for a human user, especially with the average user reaching the top of that course after a few months. Perfect scores for 12 hours a day are not realistic with human fatigue and course error (when you do 5000 word courses on speed review, redundant choices are often shown – two different multiple choices that are correct; makes it almost impossible to get perfect scores unless you’ve memorized not just the words but the course errors).
In any case, it’s a moot point in this situation – mkam745 deleted their account or they were deleted by administrators once they were found out, which supports my point.
But to step back: I’ve been here about 6 years as well, the cheating has become much more prevalent over this time. It’s usually on one of the large 10,000 word review courses for more esoteric languages, so they aren’t noticed as quickly by other users.
An obvious solution would be to allow us to customize our leaderboards so that we could exclude users that were obviously cheating. Or give us the option to disable the leaderboard. On any other social media site you’re allowed to block users, but here it’s not even an option. This is something that should be developed if the designers don’t know how to combat the cheating itself.
DW7, I’ve created a number of courses as well. It’s nice to see user participation, but what is that worth if the numbers you’re seeing are inflated by bots?
If course developers want to see course participation, this should be a separate tool. That way you can get accurate assessments of how many people are using your course, instead of a mixture of real users and bots motivated by fake internet points.
I like the leaderboards, but I’ve always suspected some people were cheating.
On the other hand, you shouldn’t underestimate the speed you can reach if you do a course again and again.
The MemRise team are very good at investigating any “cheat” courses or people “points farming” and do take action if you report something you suspect.
I would also like to be able to disable the leader board . I’m not even competitive, but the blatant cheating is so irritating. These cheaters must have some sort of personality disorder because what is the point?
