Hey there! As you know a few weeks ago we communicated and executed on the decision to leave Decks behind.
Many of you gave us feedback, some of you we even talked personally to. The feedback is divided into different areas and we are here to talk about one of them - the forum.
As you know and can see, we have done quite a lot of work lately to make this space a bit more responsive, healthier and better. We have read all your feedback on this and we agree on many things and so we are going to do a few things about it. There are a few things we can’t do for different reasons (resources, effort, effort/benefit, etc)
Here are the things we are doing:
We are restructuring the forum to reflect that Decks is no more, but we are also using this opportunity to clean up and organise it in a way that makes sense (at least it does to us, please do let us know).
We are reviewing all user groups so that they will reflect staff correctly and the groups we trust.
We are working to set up an email to be sent to course creators. The aim is to direct them to the forum to meet new people and share their courses. (We won’t link forum and course creation at this time, but we hope you find this a good compromise to make the community forum more visible to our users).
The categories will be as follows:
Welcome
Meet&Greet
General Discussion
Announcements
Official Memrise Courses
User Generated Content
This will also include Abandoned courses, from Decks Bugs
Bug Control
iOS
Web
Android
We will merge the Decks bugs into Web bugs and all the relevant topics on the Decks categories into their relevant new places.
You will start seeing these changes in the following hours/days
Thanks for this. A couple of initial thoughts/suggestions:
The Forum “Guidelines”, which set the ground rules for forum etiquette, are currently hidden away (in the “About” section) behind the menu button in the top bar. Would it be possible for them (or at least a link to them) to be included in the “Welcome” section, which is likely to be the first area visited by newbies?
Is there a particular reason why “Community-created courses” are now being called “user generated content”? We are all used to the current name and “community” is a friendlier term. Could we keep it?
As a way of encouraging more course creators to add a course forum, I suggested some time ago that you could insert a permanent banner message in a prominent place on the course creation page asking people to open a course forum page when they make their course public. Is there any support for this?
Is there a reason for the order you have chosen for the sub-sections in the “Bug Control” section (ie why are the sections for app versions separated by the web version)?
Definitely. We will do that and thanks for flagging.
Community-created courses is the right name. We will be looking for places where it is mentioned in a different way and changing it
Product-wide changes are not something that this update touches and I am afraid I can’t promise anything I am not able to follow through with. However the campaign will be triggered when a user creates a course, that way all users creating courses, will be aware.
That is the way it was, we will be looking at ways to make it better in the next couple of days and there might be indeed better ways of doing it.
Any particular reason why you are refusing to make a direct communication channel with course creators? Email invitations are better than nothing, but you are beating around the bushes again…
Hey Hombre_sin_nombre it is not that we are refusing to do that. Is that at the moment we wont be moving to a different forum platform like the one we had in the past.
Users are still encouraged to create a thread for a course and that is the aim of that campaign.
Other campaigns to existing course creators could be done. The one I have described would be recurrent. The one you mention would be a one off. Could potentially be done.
Jesus, your answer could not be more obscure than that. What I “mentioned” - what I had in mind when asking about direct channel - is a private messaging, and it is not a one off campaign. In some ideal world it could solve this problem with communication altogether, though I guess it’s not that simple, taking into account many things. But what do you think about PM with course creators?
PM - a poor solution, I for ex do not wish to receive PMs and I shall never again post links to my courses in the fora. I do hope the old links are gone.
I had problems with PMing, all sort of not so … balanced users simply pm-ed obscenities and infantile crap. One of them was so pissed off that I do not care about his being upset that someone has more points than him, he pestered me for weeks… You also had an insult or two in the bag, or? … I did report that user (not you) to the moderators, one mod responded displaying something very close to Schadenfreude/ gloating … i never received one apology from that guy, or from that moderator
Hi Jesus, Sorry I’m going to be a bit OT - I’ve created a couple of courses in Sinhalese (which is not available in your list of languages). Could you recommend me the forum to post the announcement to?
Hi Jesus @JBorrego, an additional thought along similar lines to Clint’s…
I would like to suggest that a clickable link be automatically added to each course’s homepage which, on clicking, would open a new window for access to a corresponding, previously automatically generated forum thread.
I think you’re wrong on this. To be clear, what I’m suggesting is that the course homepage clickable links to course-specific forums that were removed by Memrise in 2016 be re-implemented. At the time, the change caused a massive reduction (maybe 95%) in course discussion activity, and the situation has noticeably worsened over the last few years.
Efficient communication helps course creators (and contributors) maintain courses. And I can’t see any significant downside to making this change. Server storage requirements might increase by a few hundred MB, but that’s a tiny amount these days.
Brilliant news Jesus (@JBorrego), and thanks for all you have done - especially cleaning up the Forum.
I still think that on the courses (learning) area some courses could fit into one of several categories, so a filter by a course title (or key word field) or group category name is invaluable when someone is looking for a topic to learn.
Regarding:
Ideally this should be Creators not Users.
It should only be Users when there is no thread already and then the user has should include the @Creator (and @Contributor) [and invite them], so they visit the page, should they ever become active.
PS
Could you consider renaming this sub-group (as technically all non-language courses are listed afterwards/ below).
I quite agree - something I suggested as soon as the old forms disappeared.
Good idea using bit.ly (although I don’t know how to generate one) as we are so limited to space but personally I never click those links because I don’t know where they might take me - perhaps to some rouge web-site.
Oh didn’t realize that bitly url shorteners are frowned upon, Ok I will expand it. I think I have enough space for the full link – but yes it should have its’ own field in a creator course web page.
There is no need (I think) to show the whole link perhaps just the relevant bit.
eg
/forum-changes-improvements/51176 or
/course-forum-100-wonders-of-the-world-by-theomf/41759
