Until commas are restored to their old behavior, I literally cannot continue reviewing in over half the courses I’ve been taking on memrise. And now here’s a memrise developer saying they intentionally don’t plan to ever restore it? WTF?
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@Hydroptere I don’t think you should have to change your courses. Hopefully the bug will be fixed soon - I was only posting what I was going to do and a possible solution for those who were interested.
I think it would be a good idea - and there may be this already on the site somewhere - for memrise to record what the effects of punctuation are - eg commas versus obliques / what happens in reviewing when there are spaces eg a/b as opposed to a / b. Other things I’ve noticed are that accents can be missed out in a main answer, but not in alternatives. Apostrophes can be missed out too yet both of these can be really important in language learning.
On a fundamental point @hung-phan, could you or one of your colleagues please explain why Memrise is introducing changes that have a significant impact on the operation of our courses without any advance warning?
Memrise encourages the making of user-created courses and people put in many hours of work in creating them and keeping them current. It is not good practice for you to then ‘break’ those courses without warning or explanation. It alienates your course creators and learners alike.
This has been a major PR failing of Memrise for a number of years now.
Edit - Sorry, @kotodama. I seem to have duplicated most of your points as I didn’t see your post until I had made mine.
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i suspect @hung-phan does only what his boss(es) told him to do…
is @daniel.zohar still the big boss of devs at memrise? could he please please please explain to us, what it is happening in here?
cos, have you tried the userscript (or Hung) pasted above? I have mine installed as a Chrome TamperMonkey user-script and it fixes both the parenthesis and comma issue.
But at any rate Memrise clearly should not just have introduced this change without having a way to distinguish between courses where comma is used a separator and those where it’s not.
@hung-phan, when i try to review after using the script, it says ”We’re sorry, there was an error. The Memrise team have been notified and are getting on it.” It seems that it accept item as reviewed but doesn’t give points.
Better write a program for yourself, last time it took 9 days to fix the comma-gate! Oh wait but than it worked for full 6 days! LoL
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I didn’t try hung’s script but it did look like it wouldn’t work because it referenced a variable that’s not available at the global context of the web console. Did you try mine?
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;}your script is only for Chrome, isn’t so? thanks anyhow
Should work in all browsers, but I don’t know how you install it as a Greasemoney script for Firefox.
Do you need to import your data level by level or is there a way to do it in batch?
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.
Ben
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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.
Having said that I’ve now finished two sessions with the following:
“0 / 0 words learned 0 in long term memory (LTM)”
and no points recorded. Not sure if it’s the fault of my script yet.
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?
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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
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