Hi @kevin5284
Could you tell us more about official Memrise courses? Are you gonna do major upgrades to them or just slowly add few bits here and there? It seems that without community courses there is not much of content on Memrise left IMO and official courses are pretty basic
While the very idea of keeping apart two different platforms may have sense from both technical and learning points of view the way Memrise doing it is so questionable.
āFreeā and āForeverā sound like fun, but what we really see is a freaking lot of scepticism and negativity towards this decision. There was hardly even one positive voice and probably that should activate an alarm bell. Memrise is silent in social media pages about Decks, which is also quite weird in my point of view (sister site about which you are prefer not to talk, yeah?).
Memrise are not even recounting positive perks (just like thereās none), not trying to explain anything, nor reassuring sceptics. Maybe you are not entitled to speak in details, well, then bring here your boss. Just compare your superficial answers (nothing personal) with the usersā posts who are so passionate about their loss.
Itās like Iāve been invited to a party which actually is a someoneās funeral and perhaps it really is. The atmosphere around this announcement is oppressive. Let me remind you that this is still a small fraction of the Memrise users and negativity will only grow stronger, because nobodyās likes to lose their favorite app.
In regards to your responses here and Edās post, thereās a very clear contradicition: you need money to support your project and at the same time you are doing so much (sometimes by not doing anything) to disappoint your loyal customers. Moreover, you are saying that you do not need customers money. Itās a nonsense and thereās something wrong. Maybe the users should just pitch in and buy out this product from you. It looks like a heavy burden to Memrise.
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@alanh @Angharad.Merfin @theprophe we are working on it. Itās annoying for us too that the Memrise website isnāt great on non-desktop devices!
Weāre aiming to make the whole Decks site mobile (and tablet) friendly apart from Course Creation and Groups, which we think are features that are best used on a big screen.
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Thanks @amanda-norrsken @Angharad.Merfin for the suggestions. Iāll incorporate them into the proposal Iām writing and and share it around for feedback soon
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Hi @t0panka yes the idea is to do major work on the official courses, not just tweaks. Ed talks a bit about this a bit in the Decks blog post at the bottom
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hang in there !One good thing with this all is that the community cares and raises issues. It means the situation is still open for fixing. The other option is apathy and the course creators just abandon the platform and with that any goodwill and free marketing created by an active and happy community will go away ā and in the crowded language learning world itās expensive to market products compared with free labor. It could still happen if no direct actions to address the concerns the community has raised:
- no offline mode
- no mobile app
Compared with other language learning systems and tools Memrise has an active content creation community ā to let it fall apart due to lack of long-term support and listening would be a sad example of a company that lost one of their most valuable assets ā evangelists.
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has an active content creation community
Terrible timing, or maybe, great timingā¦ I was about to sink huge efforts into creating intermediate and someday advanced courses for Japanese. Iām far from the best at course creation, but Iāve taught at colleges before (math,) and do know how to make courses at that level. I suppose, as they say, I dodged a bullet. Iām furiously frustrated, tho. I didnāt want to have to figure out anki in the last week or two of me finishing RTK.
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Iām stayingā¦ for now. But mostly only so I can hang around after D-day and watch everything go to sh*te (and probably make mocking comments at them on the forum until I inevitably get banned, because Iām a sour cow like that).
Iād already finished their official German courses (the old ones ā the new ones suck) and glanced at a few other languages that took my fancy, but I only ever used Memrise for vocab acquisition really ā hence my using mostly frequency courses, Duo vocab lists and specific, targeted vocab that goes along with my general interests. I need to start downloading courses if I want to keep hold of any content thatās actually useful to me, I guess (man, that means setting up Ankiā¦ not fun).
Also, imagine how far my ālearned wordsā counter is going to drop after this : O
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I need to start downloading courses if I want to keep hold of any content thatās actually useful to me, I guess (man, that means setting up Ankiā¦ not fun).
Itās not. -_- Iām currently doing it. I have downloaded into anki the main course I was using here, RTK. Interestingly, there isnāt a single official course Iām going to download, but there are a dozen of user created ones I am.
ok, then the team one could maybe find a way to allow the user have some very basic options for customizing the dashboard and the learning/review pages?? some very basic options that would not consume too many resources?
for my part, I found it extremely learning-disrupting whern the UI was site changed back in 2014 and then continued to change, sometimes the changes came every second month.
If I remember well, the team was trying to close the gap between the design of the app and that of the site, but the resultsā¦: the ugly colours, the huge tabs, the much info crowded in diff. colours in the space around the course tab, the disapperance of āpinā, the deletions of most mems, etcā¦
I am using an long userscript, which obscures goals, the clock, the ugly colour of ādifficult wordsā (is still that lila colour?), and some other stuff. If of any interest, I can PM you my main userscript - which is simply a compilation of usersscripts and css lines as posted in here, in the old fora, on userscript.org and github - as an example of what some people consider disturbing on the current site.
many thanks for at least listening
Who tried Memorion?
Iāll look back through posts ā I know Iāve seen links tools that may expedite this, at least. I justā¦ I hate having to deal with Anki andā¦ itās a pretty lonely way to learn, too. I donāt think I need any of the official courses either ā though there are some user courses I never got around to I will have to add to my own list. Shame about the not-being-able-to-download-audio problem, as it makes courses so much better.
geesus
Do you remember for ex the endless complaints that came from more or less prude, dishonest or honest or etcetctetc people, complaining about āoffensiveā mems, āoffensiveā profiles, āoffensiveā links links and what ever, appearing as such in the community created courses??? (I personally warned at the time about the nefarious results of such endless complaining).
as company trying to offer a product to small kiddies (from certain prude places) as well, I do bloody hell separate my main product and keep it free from such āoffensiveāā stuff, and leave the other site to the āadults in the roomāā. And the liability for the adult stuff lies with the respective user and not the company, who does not dare to charge one for such āoffensiveā stuff. And such decision is pleasing to the ears of the ārecent and greedy investorā who just gave 15 mill to memrise. A separate site and app for the in-house courses means complete control over the app and the site, finally.
The only point that remains in discussion is: what does the respective company earn from keeping up and improving such site and such app (Decks), and how does this company earn at least the costs to keep it runing? I do strongly suspect that the number of paying pro for community courses is not as big at it seems in here, and does not really bring too much profit.
Simple logic, yeah?
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Itās not all the community courses are like that and not like memrise official courses are amazing with useless sentences like āI donāt like Hentaiā.Why the hell would I use that sentence as a beginner.
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Iām not a software dev, just a mathematician, butā¦ Iāve known a few of those creatures. I donāt see any reason for a second site. Weāve all seen plenty of websites that are super advanced and make current memrise look like it wants to crawl back into the 90ās. Saying it is for āoverheadā is either the software devs admitting theyāre clueless, or, more likely, the money pigs are saying they want to max-min the equations, and real language learning isnāt as important as $$$ and tons of subscribers who forget they have an account here.
A million users who know half the hiragana, 5 kanji, and a dozen phrases theyāll never use, but - importantly - forget their account here are worth so much more money than a small number of people who are and have become fully bilingual or more here.
As far as kiddos, there are again simple solutions, age restrictions, moderators, punishments for users who step out of lineā¦ we worked those things out in the 90ās.
There is no reason to actually cut this out to another site, other than one: they plan to ax it for the sake of money. Which is a shame, as someone who lived in Japan for years, studied in college a year of Japanese, this was some of the best material - and Iām not talking about the official courses. The user created courses are gold, and not very long ago, I planned to help make those in the near future for more advanced subject matter - especially since I plan to apply for a masters degree over there in Japanese lit and will have a ton to share I believe.
A thousand deep comment threat canāt hide the obvious fact: theyāre going to destroy user created content for the sake of money for the money pigs. Weāre a tool inside a product, not people learning languages.
$$$ toxic. EDIT: I cussed. Sorry. Capitalism is still pure evil.
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@400b21369ad55d756773 Such a damn shame too, memrise was and still is the best website to learn, although weāre looking at the final days of this being the case by the look of it.
Edit: Capitalism is the best economic system there is. Socialism does not work.
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Itās not capitalismās fault. As always, itās just some incompetent people who get to decide things they have little idea about.
I mean to say, even if we assume that a capitalist is someone necessarily aiming for the profits and profits alone, they wouldnāt do such a silly thing. Memrise, given its size, is still somewhere in the area where the fastest way to get stable raise in income is to grow user base.
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Many thanks @Milamy but those threads seem to be only about the Forums (ie here) not the automatic Contributor rights to courses but I did add a possible pending answer from @kevin5284
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