It’s crazy that nobody from Memrise replied to any feedback about the new design.
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It’s not a secret that the top priority for Memrise team during the last years was development and promotion of the official courses, growing in numbers instead of growing in quality. Memrise community could disagree on the subject, however this policy works, they are attracting new users/income. Nothing has been improved or fixed on the side of community courses at the same time, even worse, some features were eliminated. It says a lot that there’s still no link to the so called “sister” website on the main Memrise page, either it completely slipped their minds or was done intentionally. Someone could say that Decks are still full of bugs to advertise it, but the same goes now to the main website.
The chief himself said they have no intentions to invest efforts in Decks (“We won’t actively invest in creating new learning features for it”), and the overall impression from his post is that community courses is a sort of a cumbersome burden for them. Decks are doomed to be abandoned as soon as the most annoying bugs will be fixed. That is to say, lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate. But there’s a silver lining in it, since almost every improvement by Memrise in the last couple of years was a failure. No news is a good news here. All in all, it’s sad, because this website as we knew it is dying.
I don’t know what’s the problem for Memrise team to have an intelligible dialogue with users, most of the answers are superficial, if any, but most likely the reason lies in the fact that users and Memrise managers are looking into completely different directions.
By the way, perhaps cancelled subscriptions by longtime users and their exodus to other platforms is what they really craving for. 
One thing less to worry about.
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Hombre…
"I’ve been there, I know this’’ … we know this… we are long term users in this thread… i’ve said something similar (but i hope i did not hurl insults in every line i wrote, like you do) years ago, meanwhile I am older and wiser… learnt not to put all my eggs in one basket.
get out of this I-hate-memrise-because-they-do not-do-what-I-want-and-I’m-telling-it-to-everybody phase and move on… build yourself a set of alternatives and stop relying only on memrise for a good language game. These derniers cris d’amour won’t help
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Coming in late to this pinned topic. But wish to thank you for your constructive criticism. As well as many other pertinent remarks from many “long term” users on this thread.
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Man, I don’t want to be engaged in this sort of dialogue, but I will answer you just once. So because you are older and wiser and my opinion is too critical I should shut up? I don’t think it’s fair. Instead of using generalizations, you could tell me where I’m wrong about Memrise, if wrong at all. Besides, did I ask you what to do? Then your advices are so unsolicited.
The new Decks is almost unusable. I am a long time Memrise user and have led many students to the site but I will not lead them to Decks. I am not sure about memrise either, although I love it, I think that you are going down the wrong path.
Please rethink your strategy. Yellow does not a language learning site make and it actually looks childish. Thanks for trying to help us learners but you have really screwed up>
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I am also a long time user, I joined memrise in 2011 I believe and found it a wonderful resource which I have recommended to many, many people along the way. I’ve created a number of courses which serve thousands of learners including teachers who promote my courses to their students and I contributed to the start up when memrise was making the video dictionary a few years ago. I flatter myself that I am one of a number of users who helped memrise to take off in the early days and become the platform it is today. I payed to become a premium member from the start just so that I could financially support what I thought was an incredibly valuable platform.
What sets memrise apart from and above other platforms like duolingo and babbel etc is that the courses are simple and user-generated meaning that both advanced and beginners can use memrise to learn and frequently for their very individual set of circumstances. I suppose this will still be the case for Decks, but I am concerned that it does not seem like the Decks website bugs that have been brought up have been addressed. I also worry that the main pull for memrise (that vocabulary and courses are customised) will vanish and that funding for the continuation of the sites will be diminished. Furthermore I worry that all the funding will go into developing the memrise site rather than the Decks site, because the former is the one bringing in the money via premium accounts.
I don’t bother so much about the re-designs which have happened over and over in the time I’ve been on memrise, but what I really miss is how memrise developers used to really engage with and listen to the website’s users.
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Since you’re older and wiser than him you should not use fallacies " build yourself a set of alternatives and stop relying only on Memrise for a good language game." what kind of logic is that?
Hating Memrise for ignoring a part of the fanbase is a valid reason to hate.
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what? what is fallacious in here - from a logical point of view? what kind of logic, classical, fuzzy, deontical, mathematical, etc? what are you talking about? which are the wrong premisses, the fallacious reasoning that follow into a false conclusion? and that please from my sentences, as it should (to stay into aristoteles and co., probably the rest is too difficult for you)
if you hate memrise, quit it. “Valid reason to hate” … sorry ??? and you’re constantly coming in here to express your eternal hatet? and you think people have to bow to your hate, or what? some of you are really scary people…
and yes, a part of the fanbase, count the replies for the new design of memrise (i dont care about memrise anymore, more about decks, indeed, i admit): 207 plus 30 plus 129 plus 3 plus 11. That is all. And now divide that number taking into account that many people posted the same thing 10 times…
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Your fallacy is avoiding the problem.Memrise did changes that a group of people think are bad and you tell one of those people(Hombre) to build an alternative instead of expressing what’s the problem in those changes.This is not a solution because the problem of those changes still exist and building an app is not a simple thing to do.
If we think the changes are bad do you expect us to say everything is great on Memrise and not mention the problems?
This sentence is disrespectful “some of you are really scary people” you can’t say that people you don’t know personally are scary.
Whatever it’s 1% or 50% it’s still a part of a fanbase and you can’t just ignore them.
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Very well said. I think I’m going to cancel my subscription with them now. I’m so frustrated with Memrise. Which doofus keeps making these changes?
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I’m frustrated too.
I have never had so many errors and slowdowns in the app as I have had since the recent update and layout change. Sometimes when the app is deciding whether to recommend new words, or classic review, or speed review, it will just break down and the whole recommendation bar will just be a solid yellow, and I have to exit out of the app to reset it. I posted this on another forum too, but now when you finish a level for a community course, it doesn’t notify you that you finished a level and just moves onto the next one. There is literally NO indication. Sometimes I’ll tell myself “let’s just finish this level, then I can watch netflix” but I constantly have to exit out to see my progress on the level. I know it’s such a small thing, but it is so annoying to me. There was literally no reason to change it.
Currently there is nothing as convenient as memrise for me and my current learning goals, but I have zero loyalty to this company. They keep dropping the ball and I am just waiting for a better app to come along.
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How awesome would it be if they open-sourced decks…
I’d more than happily put my hand up to help improve it.
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How awesome would it be if they open-sourced decks…
Now there is a constructive idea. I love it. Since they’ve said apparently they won’t be working on any new features for Decks, nor will there really be an income for them from it, it would make perfect sense to give it to the community to improve as the community wishes/needs. I need more hearts to click for your idea, one isn’t enough.
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Since Memrise and Decks have a lot of a common programming code it’s not in their interest to give it away, especially for free. Businesswise it’s not a good move. I’d rather suggest to find a sort of a sponsor to buy out this product from Memrise, maybe this could be an option. But there were many similar suggestions in the last months and they didn’t answer to neither of them.
You’d think, yet plenty of big companies have done pretty well out of open-sourcing much of their code.
If Decks were open-sourced, Memrise would suddenly have 100s if not 1000s of willing volunteers finding and fixing bugs in their code, which they could apply back to their commercial product.
I was also thinking that only the web/server component need be open-sourced initially. The apps could still be built from proprietary code (because of how apps are signed and uploaded to App/Play store it would be hard to do otherwise). But it would need a lot of policing (or better, thorough automated integration testing) to ensure breaking changes weren’t made to the APIs etc.
The tricky issue is the connection to their database tier. Maybe if they had a test database for testing purposes. As with anything else it has to do with money. You need a dedicated technical resource to go through push requests for integration – can’t just integrate any bug fixes left and right. I don’t think Memrise is a big enough company to have such a resource.
Also for most medium to big sized companies, the open source publication is more of a PR image thing than actually something they get mileage of. The biggest resource is either recruiting engineers who know the code base from open source and getting good (hopefully) bug reports. Or then have an avenue for app developers to bypass issues with workaround learnt from the code. Doubt Memrise has any use of any of these cases as it’s a small company and it’s not an app framework and I suspect they use common technologies that most decent web developers know from previous jobs.
All true, you’d need volunteers not just to work on the source, but to do all the dev-ops around deployment/hosting/testing etc. Not expecting it to happen any time soon.