@DrewSSP: Thank you so very much for sharing your script! 
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and memrise gives us the cadeau of even more phantom entries! now, after ruining my eyes to comply with the latest memrise requirements (which are as always in dictatorship manner, i.e. “take it or leave it”), my databases are full with phantom entries.
@Hydroptere ~ I have to admit this fear was my initial gut reaction when I read the news from @BenWhately about the change in comma formats. I purposely did not touch any of my courses because of this fear. But if changes have effected (affected ?) your courses, then one would imagine they would do so with similar changes to the underlying Memrise-official course databases whenever they made their changes. If they didn’t, then perhaps they know a way to get rid of them (without using @DrewSSP’s script). If that is the case, then maybe they should share how they did it. If their databases were not effected (affected ?) but ours are, then why is this ?
my head is spinning… i just finished “updating” two courses of mine. It really crosses my mind to delete the others, but when I see that i have thousands of items to review in them, and remember myself that those words will vanish into the night of oblivion if i dont repeat them…
I don’t expect an answer from memrise … profficient at creating problems to others and not addressing those problems
and where is the script??? (as said, my head is spinning)
Thanks for all of the information in this thread. I am having this problem as well. Now I at least have a possible solution to try.
The script is located here: https://github.com/iamwillow/delete_phantom_answers
You have to know the basics of computer programming to run it. You’ll need to have Python on your computer as well as a few Python libraries that you can install with Pip.
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that looks like too much work. I’ll drop it. Thanks, Willow!
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I agree with you Hydroptere “my head is spinning” and thanks @iamwillow but I have no idea how to action scripts and feel it’s safer to leave alone.
I will continue to review all the courses I support and spot the effect. Thankfully I have generally put alternatives in as hidden alternatives, so it will work anyway.
unfortunately the phantom entries (both the edited and deleted categories) keep coming up in tests… and the user is lost… with all this editing around the new separators, courses are full of phantoms…
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@Hydroptere do you have a mac computer? If so, I can give you instructions on how to set up the script and run it to fix your course.
Later on, we should recommend this feature to Memrise so that users can do this just by clicking on a button.
Hi, Willow
couldn’t we recommend it to memrise NOW, as most courses with active creators are full of phantoms? how do we do that?
many thanks
— [email protected] wrote:
Hi @DrewSSP
The issue should be fixed for you.
Well I thought we had eliminated the two ghost images in “Alternative” or “Possible” answers (a blank and a fighter) in the way suggested above, yet they have re-appeared today!
Guess I’ll have to repeat the process you taught me, when I re-discover which questions were giving me the ghost answers.
PS Just done it for the Cheetah, Chimpanzee and Spider in case it was those ones.
PPS I’ve just retested those three and I now have a different selection of images for them - so I guess those ghost images were set up for more animals than I realised when the course was created.
It’s good to see people using this method to fix their problems. So it worked for you?
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@DrewSSP ~ thank you VERY much for this solution. I did not opt for the script route, but instead chose to manually fix all the phantom answers in my database based on your instructions. It took some time, but it worked in EVERY instance for the one course I applied it to. I am now meticulously working my way through a second course. Thank you for pinpointing what the issue was, and how (easily it is) to rectify it. Have a great day ! 
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Thanks @DrewSSP, your posts did help me a lot in understanding the problem. More or less I’ll say the same things you wrote already again, but looking at the exact scripts was very helpful for me so I’ll still share.
So, the problem is that Memrise doesn’t accesses the database while “choosing” the wrong answers in multiple choice questions. Instead it generates wrong answers at a point (when you first start doing the course??) and adds them as some kind of “tags” to the word. And it won’t change those once generates tags when you change items in your database.
You can see the connected wrong answers for an item in the script that opens with the “ID-link” DrewSSP offered, for example http://www.memrise.com/api/thing/get/?thing_id=128626621:
Connected wrong answers in the script
Only words in that list did show up for real:
So, we have to force Memrise to redo the tagging. And the solution of DrewSSP with adding a letter and deleting it again in all text-columns works for me. It’s important you do this in all text-columns, doing it just in one column isn’t enough (I did this mistake first).
I’ve also realized that adding the new letter does the trick, you don’t necessarily have to delete it again.
Script after adding “X” in both columns
So, if you want to do the “manual” solution and if it’s only a private course you may just add a point after every item and leave it there. Doesn’t really disturb you while learning and saves you the time for deleting an added letter again.
Sadly, I don’t know enough about programming for using the script. So, I’ll do the point-adding manually now. But I’m still happy I found a solution even if this will take some time, but still muuuuch better than creating the whole course again or having a course with 90% old uncorrected answers as I added something to every word in one column which never showed up.
And maybe someone finds another solution to “force” Memrise to update the tagged wrong answers without the script or adding a sign to the existing columns. I already tried a bit like adding another text column and writing “x” in it or adding “x” as alternative answer, but sadly this didn’t make Memrise redo the connected wrong words.
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I’ve found a very fast way for adding and deleting an additional letter with using your keyboard if you opt for the “manual solution”. You can do every page of the Database in less than a minute this way.
Click into the first item of the first column. Then press “x” and “arrow downwards key” in turns. While pressing the downwards-key the cursor jumps into the next item and it’s automatically in “writing” mode. So you can add an x in front of every word very fast. Do the same with the 2nd column. And then click into the first item and press “delete key” and “arrow downwards key” in turns.
So basically:
1st column: x ↓ x ↓ x ↓ x ↓ x ↓ x ↓ …
2nd column: x ↓ x ↓ x ↓ x ↓ x ↓ x ↓ …
1st column: Delete ↓ Delete ↓ Delete ↓ Delete ↓ …
2nd column: Delete ↓ Delete ↓ Delete ↓ Delete ↓ …
Edit: Actually this isn’t as perfect as I thought as sometimes “xWord” gets generated as connected wrong answer. So only way of doing it with keys is pressing
x Tab x Tab ↑ Delete Tab Delete Tab
x Tab x Tab ↑ Delete Tab Delete Tab…
Which needs much more concentration then nicely just pressing the same two buttons in turn 
Still faster than clicking with the mouse into the field all the time though.
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Hi @DerMoment1608, many thanks for your comments and suggestions above.
While pressing the downwards-key the cursor jumps into the next item and it’s automatically in “writing” mode.
I have used this method extensively, but the problem many of us have had is rogue answers being offered as alternatives (ie something unwanted - a photo of a child soldier in an animal course - even though it is not visible in the database!).
The method I have used to solve this problem is as described above (deleting the item that has generated the alternatives then reinstating it).
One annoying feature I was not aware of at the time was where a course had some Lower Case at the start of the sentence and I capitalised them as well, the alternatives with LC still appear and so a shrewd learner can know that that is not the answer to another question!
In other words, it’s not just deleted answers but also uncorrected (or un-modified) answers that are the probem!
Yeah, I was more writing about “my” problem (after changing every entry in a column only the old, unchanged entries did show up as wrong answers in multiple choice tests) and didn’t point that out. But it’s part of the “big problem” as the reason and solution is exactly the same as described in the beginning of the topic.
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did it ever work? i still get the phantom/rogue answers …
Hi @Hydroptere
Did it ever work? I still get the phantom/rogue answers …
In my case yes and no.
It did work for every item I performed that routine on.
What I did not realise is that there were a lot of other entries that had that ‘deleted’ image chosen, at the start, in it’s alternatives, so I have had to continue the routine on several more entries as I discover them.