I mourn for the Memrise I fell in love with, but on longer exists

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Memrise Pro automatically renewed today. I’ve asked Memrise to cancel Pro and refund my money. Here’s a copy of the email I sent them when requesting a refund:

I used to be one of Memrise’s biggest fans. I was one of the top ten in the January 2015 Memathon, and in the top 50 in the September 2015 Back-to-School Memathon. When the Global Leaderboard still existed, I made up to 35th All-Time and stayed in the top 50 for months. I used to recommend Memrise to anyone who was remotely interested.

Not anymore.

Over the last year or two, there have simply been too many instances where Memrise’s “improvements” made the website less functional, less fun, or more annoying. Some of those changes, such as the comma to semi-colon change, were good in the end, but the transition was handled quite poorly. Changing the behavior of commas without notice, ignoring the panic in the forums for days, then claiming it’s a bug, and then eventually admitting that it’s intentional and going to stay that way eroded the trust of the users. (This is not the only instance of this kind of bad customer service, but it’s a memorable one.)

And the app… I quit using it two years ago. The biggest deal-breaker was removing mems from the learning session unless I got something wrong, but that’s not the only problem. It requires too much clicking and scrolling in order to get to what I want to do, it resorts to multiple choice too easily, and it has never had mem creation (on the iOS version).

The new Ziggy thing totally sucks. He’s ugly and abstract. I liked the garden imagery much better. The old titles, such as Memperor, were cute; level numbers are boring and impersonal. The loss of the streak badges is demotivating. The loss of the opportunity to review mems after a review session is bad. The mems are THE THING that makes Memrise more usefull that the other options.

Months ago, Memrise removed mems from everything for several days, and then after people in the forums protested, mems were re-instated for user-created courses. That they were removed at all has made me question where I should spend my language-learning time and energy. (If you’re willing to take them away once, there’s reason to believe that you’ll do it again, and to believe that you think they’re not that important.) It has taken me a while, but I’ve realized that Memrise is no longer where I want to invest my time.

I mourn for the Memrise I fell in love with, but no longer exists.

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Not to rub salt in the wound, but they’ve made it so mems disappear again. I did a review session, selected a bunch, then when I reviewed later THE SAME DAY, they were all gone.

But look. No one from the staff here cares to comment when long-term members complain. I think the silence is enough of an answer.

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Well said.

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A bit to early to expect reaction … nevertheless I do not expect them to comment in reasonable time either.

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We’ve been talking about this since August 18.

Unless you’re being sarcastic? haha Two months is always too early to respond to paying customers!

I also asked @BeaTrisy about this just yesterday. Can't Add Courses to Groups - #13 by TheFour-GatedDanzig and in other threads before then.

At least for me, the mems would stick around a day or so, but now they’re completely gone after a session.

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Aha! Well, not being sarcastic. Just understood in the context of the post by Caspian. That would, he had posted it three hours ago, it looked like you expected, they should have reacted to his post here already :-):sweat_smile:

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Hi! I was active on Memrise about three years ago, and I loved it. It seemed more straight forward. I enjoyed my learning and just using the site was interesting and
a pleasure,.,You could browse pictures and choose an appropriate one suitable for the phrase you had in mind to act as reminders, the forums seemed more accessible and I made many friends…

I am back again, and I am completely bewildered! Memrise has changed so much I just don’t know where I am. ! seem to be stuck on the same couple of pages, I am clicking here there and everywhere and just stumble upon odd things like here!. I’ve only managed to do a few phrases of French and cannot seem to find any order or sequence to the lessons. Perhaps it is just me, but it isn’t the Memrise I recall not unless I have looked back with rose coloured spectacles!

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The point that so many people are making about Memrise improvements are that often they reduce the fun. I’m really turned off by recent changes. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!

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it might be, but the original poster spoke about the web version (it seems for some people appears as extraordinary/unusual/strange/crazy to not use the app but the web version?). Personally, I dislike the app, i’ve tried to use it, but… i’ll leave memrise in the moment the web version cannot be used with scripts anymore, or they take it down completely (which is very likely to happen)

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I like the APP a lot, because it is easy to use. However, I really would like to see extra modes, like ‘typing only’ or a time based one (although there is a speed review, which helps really to do an extra review).

Or a full-keyboard only (i.e. no tapping). Of course, the user needs to be able to choose whether or not tapping or full-keyboard.

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ja, ok, but that was not the point

(while there is a thin link between “easy to use” and “enhancing learning” indeed, the app is however re-enforcing only recognition! and not recall, therefore… And I find the design of the whole app quite tasteless and disturbing to the eye. Plus: App users have usually no idea how intuitive, features-rich the old memrise was. Kaspian, myself, Fronika, etcetc do remember the memrise we used to love so much)

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Right, if they get rid of the web version, and/or the scripts become unavailable, I’ll most likely have to quit.

Speaking of the web version, @BeaTrisy are we doing anything about speeding up the loading time of the dashboard? Not sure why it is still this slow.

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@BeaTrisy
Just wanted to bump what @TheFour-GatedDanzig asked.

It’s continually been slower for a couple years with loading but over the past 6 months, it’s gone from 20 seconds to load my courses to 1-2 minutes before my dashboard fully displays. Could it be that some of the old functions of the older dashboard are not displayed but still exist somewhere lagging the code up?

I also feel like this really should be priority, it takes over a minute to load the dashboard, which is supposed to be for easy/quick access to your courses. Doesn’t it defeat the purpose if to quickly go to my courses I have to make bookmarks to each course’s main screen and each course’s review session?

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quote:

the app is however re-enforcing only recognition! and not recall, therefore…

Yes, but I would change ‘only’ for ‘mostly’. If a word is deep in your memory, recognition is sufficient to keep it there, according to SRS. And different recognition/recall modes will use (slightly) different brain parts which actually helps strengthening the memory-pathways. Having said that, the ‘recall-only’ mode (with full keyboard only for phone that support that) on the App would certainly allow to weed out the ‘half-remembered’ words. I my opinion, 50% of the Classic Review of long term (say interval larger than 2 weeks), should be full typing.

Unfortunately, I only joined about 1 year ago. I know you could download courses in the past, but where the learning modes different in the past? What were they?

Memrise is still strong, because it uses a database under each course, from which the levels are sourced. This must have been quite some developing to create a database of databases that can be manipulated by the users.

PS: do you know about the new law in the EU that requires website to allow to download any personal data and take it elsewhere? IMHO, learning progress is personal data. Some light at the horizon?

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@MemriseSupport @MemriseMatty
@Joshua @JBorrego @Lien

Any chance we could get a comment on this loading issue?

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Probably not…

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Seriously should i close this topic @lien since NO-ONE is using it.

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You should, it’s still on top for no reason.

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Closing…

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Inactivity, so I decided so close.