Further I just tweaked mine slightly so that it only does the comma-splitting if the term doesn’t end with ! . or ? (i.e. it’s a full sentence). Works quite well, though unfortunately one of the courses I’m doing uses full sentences but doesn’t end the sentences with punctuation.
MEMRISE.garden.scoring.getTypingTestAccepted=function (e,t,n,i){var fa=MEMRISE.garden.scoring.getFullAccepted(e,t,n);
var punctRegExp=/[~`!@#$%^&\*\(\)\_\-\+=\{\[}\]\|\\:;"'<,>\.\?\/]/g
var r=fa.map(function(e){return MEMRISE.garden.scoring.sanitizeTypingTest(e,i)});
r.push(fa[0].replace(punctRegExp, "").toLowerCase());
if (!fa[0].match(/[\.\!\?]$/)) r.push(fa[0].split(',')[0].replace(punctRegExp, "").toLowerCase());
return r;}
i’ve installed it using stylish, and it did not work. Thanks anyhow.
I still hope that Ben and Ed (the owners) don’t really follow the wish (of those devs who came to memrise after Adam left) to ruin for ever the web-version/get rid of the web-users and user content. Or whatever is what is happening again…
Hi everyone, and my apologies for the confusion over this and the annoyance it has caused.
Memrise has changed dramatically over the last two years. After four years of steady growth, we shifted focus away form user-created courses on the website, and moved towards courses that we create ourselves, which are mainly learned on mobile. This led to explosive growth, taking us from a couple of million to tens of millions of users. A problem that comes alongside this growth is that we are now constantly balancing the needs of the 90%+ of our users who have joined in the last 2 years, and are learning on the Memrise-created courses, and the smaller numbers - often long term users - who are learning on flashcard decks created by themselves and the community. These are really two different products that we are supporting on the same technical infrastructure. Problems arise when the needs of the two groups collide - as they have done here.
On the Memrise courses we’re working on a lot of improvements in content and in new test types for testing from words used in the context of sentences. Where sentences have commas in them - as they often do - these tests get broken if commas are also used to divide up correct answers. Since there are multiple other ways to divide up correct answers, we’re discontinuing the use of commas as separators of answers. I do fully realise how annoying this is if you have a course that uses commas as separators already, and are faced with manually changing all the commas to semi colons. I am doing it for the HSK courses I made at the moment, so I do know exactly what is involved.
We certainly should have communicated this clearly and in advance, and we will now make sure we communicate the expected behaviour clearly. My apologies for all of this annoyance.
What browser are you using? If you paste that snippet I gave above into the dev tools/javascript console it should take effect immediately, even while you’re in a session.
So why didn’t any official from Memrise just say this weeks ago, instead of letting everyone think that it was a “bug” that they were working diligently to diagnose and fix?
Do you think that treating your users, users who have worked tirelessly to create some of the best courses on memrise, without compensation or thanks, like mushrooms, that is “keeping them in the dark and feeding them lots of manure” is in any way justifiable or fair?
Hi Ben,
Thanks for letting us know the reasons of this change in behavior.
I can understand that using comma’s for both sentences and as a answer dividing sign does not work.
However removing this function of comma’s also brings problems for course creators who made a lot of courses.
At the moment I have 12000 items in courses in total, and at least quite a few of these items use the (former) dividing function of comma’s. If I were to go through all these items, and assume that it takes 5 seconds to read a single item, and if there is a comma (with assumed probability 10%) in there, it would take me 10 seconds to replace it. That makes an average time of 6 seconds to check and correct each item. Multiply that by 12000 items and you get 20 hours. I don’t have that much time to go through all my courses and replace these items.
I don’t know what solution there could be to this problem, but for me 20 hours is not an amount of time I want to spend redoing all my courses.
-Xander
@BenWhately So are semicolons going to be the PERMANENT way to divide correct answers? I wouldn’t want to change items and then have to do it again! You talked of ‘multiple ways’ . If not commas and obliques what else?
Hi Ben, @BenWhately
Thanks for your answer. I am in the same situation as Xander, I use Memrise now for many years and I created lots of courses and am f.e. working on the Arabic course “1-5000 Arabic frequency”. I would like to stick to Memrise because of the possibility to upload the sounds of the words. But … change AL THOSE COMMA’S, that is impossible, It will take lot more time than Xander says.
Could you please solve this problem? For example, Is it really impossible to be able to choose for your course what you want the function of a comma to be? Or, whatever …
Or maybe you dont care to loose the old customers? In that case, could you recommand another site and help us with transferring our stuf then?
I hope to hear from you. Zwanetta
So a) make it an option or b) put some smarts in: if the answer is a sentence, it should end with some form of punctuation (. ! ?), and therefore not be split by “,” or c) provide a tool to easily fix up existing courses to replace comma with semi-colons (or whatever)
But you’re right - Memrise is trying to be two different things. Most of us in this forum have little interest in using the mobile apps and just the “official” courses, and really need our own platform. I’d love to see an open-source version of Memrise (probably with a different name etc.) for that sort of thing, but I’m not sure how realistic that would be…
Thanks for letting us know what is going on.
Can’t you make a tool that we can use to convert our databases with commas to new ones? Or is it possible to divide memrise into 2 seperate services? One for the community based courses and one for the memrise-created courses.
Maybe it is possible to write a programm of some sort which checks each item in a given course for comma’s. If it finds any, it will check how many words are before the comma and after, and if this is a small number (1 or 2 and maybe 3) it will replace the comma with a semi-colum or slash. For longer words it will do nothing, as those could be sentences. That way the bulk of the items will be done already making the task left smaller and therefore done quicker. There would than be a button for in the details tab of course creation which does this. This doesn’t have to be permanent feature, but at least for some time after this change so people don’t have to change everything.
There is an extremely simple solution off the top of my head, and that is to add a Boolean attribute to the course databases: “IsSentence”. Then adjust the client-side script so that if “IsSentence” is true, commas will not be recognized as answer separators, if false, they will continue to function as separators.
@xvg11 The only answer is that there should have been, but there was poor communication within our team. Totally my responsibility, and something we are working to improve. I am really sorry for the annoyance this has caused.
The problem stays the same, we would still have to go through each item that already exists to change this form False to True or from True to False depending on what the stand value would be.
They could make the default FALSE, so that everyone who was relying on the old behavior would not have to do anything.
Only the courses that Ben is referring to, that want new behavior would have to change.
They could set a column checkmark at the top of the “IsSentence” attribute field, “Set/Unset All”, and it would even be easy for their course creators. Problem solved.