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.
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@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.
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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.
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@Xander5E-XLgaming_in could you send me a link to your biggest courses?
@sandslane “;” and “/” are the separators that should work at the moment and will permanently.
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@Zwanetta could you put a link to that course too?
@demaxski I am looking at that, but I’m not convinced it would be faster to write that than to just manually edit the courses that people are actually learning on. I’m looking at it
For some reason I can’t pm people (or at least I can’t find out how to) and because i’m a new member I can only send two links in a forum post, while I have 6 courses with over 400 items. If you’re going to change them, are you only going to change the comma’s in the items or also in the alternatives?
I’ll take a look and see what I can do!
try sending the first two over.
Hi Ben,
It’s been a long time! Thanks very much for the explanation and for acknowledging that the lines of communication could have been better.
I understand entirely why your focus is on developing the app but are you able to tell us anything about your longer term plans for the web version?
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For some reason it still says: “New users can only send two links in the same post”, so I’ll split the post in two I guess:
These courses have about 800 and 1600 items in them respectively.
Thanks for doing this.
You can do it in a batch.
You need to register but then you have the option to create a batch.
Below “How would you like to use this API?” you have the “Bulk Extract” option.
You still have to write the complete path for each level, but I use Excel for that and it is pretty quick.
bigger they are, the harder they fall
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@BenWhately -I’ve just tried this on a course and neither work. You have to write both for example il buddista ; la buddista or il buddista / la buddista you can not write just il buddista which you could do before.
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I can confirm that, both ; and / are not working atm
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I think the whole Memrise brand worths approximately the price of a yearly membership. Maximally a couple of thousands of daily users, 90% of the users are not paying.
Interesting, though, somebody should buy it out and settle a firm background for it, because they are no exception - if they pay peanuts, the’ll hire monkeys
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@sandslane is this in a typing test or a tapping test? Can you send me a link to the course?
@alanh beyond continuing to support it and make sure it runs as smoothly as possible, we don’t have near term plans for big new developments. As our userbase and profitability has grown we have been able to expand our team a lot in the last 12 months. If we continue this path over the next 12 months then we will reach a point where we have the capacity to actively develop new features for the website. My gut feeling at the moment is that at that point we would increase the distinction between the mobile apps with the game-rich product purpose and the website with the more intense study, flashcard feel. But that is a long way from a clear decision - just a reflection of my personal current feeling, fwiw.
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you can pretty easily modify my script to support ; or / as separators if you want.
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Well, well, well - what I predicted earlier today, has actually already happened:
Memrise as a community platform is being declared dead, by @BenWhately, here. Our user-created courses, which we poured so much of our time and love into, are permanently broken, and on purpose. Memrise doesn’t care, and made the choice to break them, deliberately, and never bothered to even tell us. And now they intend not to fix them.
Years ago, and again more recently on this forum, several of us asked for a setting on database columns, to choose whether commas mark alternatives or not. Memrise ignored us, repeatedly. Now, they pretend that the only way to make their own courses work, is to kill the comma feature, and hundreds of our courses with it. If they had added this setting, it would’ve been easy to accommodate both kinds of courses, but obviously that’s not the sort of thing they consider worth their time.
Yes, Memrise’s actions over the past two years prove that. They view their old, formerly loyal user community with utter contempt. They have shown, time and time again, that they hate us.
We keep using their software because there’s nothing else out there that does this, and because we’ve spent such a huge amount of our own personal time and effort building this site and learning things here. But make no mistake, their hatred and contempt for us has been very clear for a long time. Do not expect even a shred of respect from them, whatever they say; their actions speak for themselves.
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