Why isn’t the new design announced by MemRise in the Forum? Cc @edcooke
But it is announced here:
https://blog.memrise.com/memrise-has-a-new-look/
Here are some threads about it:
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Will they be porting over to Decks the same streak-wiping-out feature that is an intrinsic part of the Memrise experience? That would probably make people feel more at home.
I could live without that feature as long as Decks is stable and keeps the nice color modes unlike the Memrise site.
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Yes, this is definitely disrespectful to many of the course creators.
A tip: If you want quality, try the longer courses instead of the short ones.
I find the longer courses to be of excellent quality, without any exception so far. Why? Because when you spend so much time creating a 5000 words long project, instead of just putting an hour or two in a short one, you really want it to be good, you put in the effort. I haven’t had any significant problems with mistakes or anything else in the long usermade courses, and they’ve lead me much further than many other vocab resources.
The official courses are trash, compared to many of the user made ones. I am actually surprised the site with the better courses will be free and the worse one paid, especially as the low level of the courses really means that even the content users will not need it after a year at most. It is weird those courses are the flagship of the Memrise company despite all the flaws.
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I think this comment is a bit harsh, I wouldn’t call the official courses “trash”, they just don’t go much further than a phrase book that you might buy for holiday purposes, that’s all.
I really like the videos, for example, so you can see how someone pronounces a word or phrase, which makes it easier to work out how to imitate production of particular sounds.
There were also some courses with a pronunciation feature, which is also a cool idea: if you can’t pronounce words or phrases accurately, then you will never be able to use that language for face-to-face communication.
The community courses can offer more depth in terms of vocabulary, but the features mentioned above are only available on the official memrise courses, which does make them something special.
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I’ve just looked at one of the updated courses and wrote a (too long, I procrastinated) post New Year, New Courses! - #44 by amanda-norrsken
These courses are not well done. The learner could even easily acquire some mistakes, they’d better head right for some of the usermade vocab courses for beginners and another resource for grammar and the rest. From a professional course (and as Premium has recently doubled the price), I would expect attention to detail and good presentation of the content they’ve chosen to present.
If the official courses were free and the community content paid, I’d agree with you. But as the official courses are being given so much more attention and being thrown at newbie learners while the unofficial ones are being moved away, I don’t think I am being harsh.
The Premium now costs 20 dollars a month and the courses are like really bad Duolingo combined with a Youtube channel. 
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The official courses are trash…
Such isolated opinionated views are very misleading. I doubt user-made courses may attract many new users to the system. I’m sure at least 90% come and learn official courses first. Probably 99%. People are attracted with well done audio, video and extras like grammar bots, speed reviews. Sure thing, a keen learner will move to extra courses after a year or two, and no chance they will pay for just official courses for more than 2 years. But it’s official courses that drive the system and generate the user base.
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The Premium now costs 20 dollars a month…
Only very lazy people don’t use very popular discount, which is $30/year.
And $60/year is a regular price.
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Maybe since Memrise focused on the app, created new offical courses and hid the user generated content in the app. But it did not use to be like that. The user generated content was easy to find and very popular on the website. I also didn’t start with official Memrise courses until later.
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it is not an isolated opinion… they were trash before tousands of users pointed out the mistakes and inconsequences… and NO, the most users did not start with the in-house courses. You seem a new user, or just someone who believes being an yes-person brings plenty of advantages?
and before you call other users “lazy”, why don’t you take a look at their profiles?
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agree with duaal and angharad.merfin
1.Memrise has created a sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. They hid the usermade courses from the app, and then found out new users were not using them. What a surprise. The user made courses had been the main product for years and certainly a popular one, but how can they compete, when they are hidden and the main issues concerning their use (above all the broken search function and no filters in the lists at all) were never solved? The fact they are still used so much despite these obstacles is a proof of how great they are.
2.If you’d look at my post in the other thread concerning the problems in the French course, or at the comments about the Japanese course by one of the teachers using Memrise and creating their own content, you will understand where the problems are. These courses are just a bait to catch newbies, who have a good intention but know nothing about language learning, and therefore won’t notice the bad quality and problems. There have been many users pointing out tons of mistakes, that is not a sign of a paid high quality product. And the critics tend to be the more experienced users or teachers usually, those “opinionated views” are opinions of people with much more knowledge and experience than the supposed “linguists” at Memrise are showing.
3.video,audio,grammar bot,… all those things are nice. But they are of limited usefulness, when the main content is trash. If you want to play with toys, pay for the official courses. If you want to really learn a language, get a real coursebook and use the Decks as a supplement.
4.Lazy people? Shouldn’t that be judged by what how much we learn, not by how much we pay? Just an idea. The problem is not whether there are sales. The problem is, that Memrise is offering a low quality product for such a price. Even the 30 dollars a year are too much for this. A course that will teach you mistakes is not worth that.
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Well i must admit that i was wrong. I said user made courses were worse than admin made ones. Now I see there are badly made admins’ courses. The most annoying thing on course is when you make one mistake in the review and memrise calls it a hard word for you 
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You can study all the words you have learnt on different courses in any given language you have learnt on the memrise website, actually.
I prefer to review individual courses myself, but there IS the option to review a particular topic or language, too, which is available on the memrise website, and the same option is on Decks, too.
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The Memrise provided language courses will for long time be restricted to a few languages, forget Icelandic, Farsi, Tibetan, Thai, Finnish… That’s where the user-provided languages fill a gap.
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I checked Spanish courses. A very popular language. 7 official courses have 20k to 200k learners. User-made ones are up to 90k.
I’d still say the official ones are more popular, not 90%, I agree. On par.
I’m not even close to be a new user. But I definitely try to be an yes-person. Like in the movie.
And I’m not your enemy here. I complained about removing the user courses as loudly as I could.
Sounds silly. The user made courses for French seem more comprehensive than Memrise’s own and I’d be considering a paid subscription if it wasn’t all just getting moved to another site.
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I would definitely agree with you, that some of the user made courses are not too good, but I think it is a minority. It is definitely possible that you simply had bad luck while picking. That would be no wonder, as we have no way to rate the courses. I hope you you’ll have better luck in future, some of the courses are really awesome 
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As said not all languages have official courses. And not all official courses have videos and grammar bot. So half of your point is moot. And official courses cover only low levels, soon they have nothing to teach you anymore.
The only thing I agree about is audio, sadly most user made courses have none and that’s frustrating, they should just implement a loudspeaking bot. And the sentences, having to build sentences helps learn word order, rather than just learning words.
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If not all the official courses have the main advantages, such as the video, what are their users actually getting for their money? They sign up for a site promising “talking like a local, lots of videos, 200 language courses” and their target languages has a few low level badly made courses without video or grammar, that’s bad luck
I agree the user made courses could do with more audio. A big part of the problem is the adding process being rather complicated and time consuming. I gave up a few times already (perhaps will try again during the summer). An easy import from forvo (that would be the best or the loudspeaking thing bot you suggest would be awesome. This one change would improve the Decks immensely!
Learning with sentences makes sense but not like this, this is not learning to build sentences, just to parrot a few of them. There are better examples.
AJATT uses decks of 10000 sentences and memorises a large part of the grammar with them, because everything is there many times. Memrise teaches a few phrases. Duolingo teaches sentences and takes alternative translations from you, does Memrise? Speakly lets you fill in parts of the sentences, ranging from one word to the whole sentence, trying to make you understand how to use the language. Memrise just lets you memorise some sentences copied from a phrasebook (and sometimes not entirely correct on top of that). Really, the sentences in the official courses are a flaw, not an asset, I’m afraid.