In the past, maybe 5 years ago, my courses were indexed by Google Search Engines. In order to be indexed, they needed to be crawled by the famous Google search bots.
The later ones I created never were indexed by Google, partly on account of the architectural structure change 3 or 4 years ago, changing the internal search engine algo of Memrise to promote their own courses. Mine fell completely off the front page for French on Memrise search.
A few people found them and they are still used by learners whom I hope will be notified of this upcoming change.
Maybe with the dedicated internal search engine on Decks, this could change for the better!
@kevin5284 Thanks again for your replies and efforts in what seems to be a hercules task in communications for this upcoming Decks platform.
If the search functionality on Decks is to be the same as the current Memrise, does that mean that Memrise Created Courses will continue to be displayed at the top before all Community Created Courses ???
I can explain you what happened, though Iâm not an engineer (well, correct me if Iâm wrong).
Most likely Memrise disabled so called robot.txt file, you might have heard of it, and therefore search engines just do not see your courses.
The robots.txt file is a text file that tells web robots (most often search engines) which pages on your site to crawl. It also tells web robots which pages not to crawl.
Non I donât think it is likely that they disabled the robot.txt file (20 years+ experience in the industry very unlikely thing to do.
It is just very hard to get a page indexed by Google when it takes more the 3 or 4 clicks to find it. Now I am wondering if they will continue to promote Memrise created courses on the Decks platform via the internal search engine. No matter. That wouldnât change anything at this point.
I suspect that the split may be a technical concern as well. This is a huge endeaver.
Well, they control Decks.com so they could do any messaging they want on that web site. If they are a commercial company of course they will actively try to get new users to use their Pro app instead.
To be objective, I would not call Memrise courses rudimentary. They are awesome. Full audio, well tested, extra fun with locals, speed review etc. Iâd pay for them.
But there is a big but. Itâs 7 courses for major languages. About 3,000 entities. It is mastered in 1 year. Most people learn only one language. And I really see no point to pay for membership after that.
After official courses many people create their private ones or use shared by others. Or learn geography, art, whatever. And this group will bring no money to memrise now. Yes, perfecting basic courses memrise will attract more new users. But how to keep them?
I may miss something, but as I see it, language learning market niche is very competitive. New players can always appear. No one can predict what new users will choose in 2, in 5 years. Relying on attracting new users only is not reliable. Old users, even if there are not so many of them, are more predictable. No one would change the learning platform without a good reason.
How do you want to avoid unsubscribing by pro-members? We are intelligent and itâs obvious that learning ONLY via phone gives you an illusion of competence in learning. I appreciate Your work a lot but Memrise courses are on around A2 levelâŚ
Iâve been a memrise user from when the app was fairly new and when offline mode didnât require a paid subscription. I have recommended this app to many of my friends because itâs community courses, simple app design and offline mode made studying for 5 minutes easier than any other app.
Migrating to Decks I can live with, no offline mode I cannot. Given the large amount of feedback here, Iâd be surprised if offline mode wasnât announced for Decks in the near future, but if itâs going to require my getting a subscription when Iâve been grandfathered into not needing one with the original memrise app, Iâll be disappointed as this is a step towards alienating your oldest users.
Ditto on all the comments for if indeed user courses wonât be accessible from an app anymore and only via mobile browser. Saving data and not needing to deal with unreliable or inconsistent internet with offline mode has been useful for when I was in China and even more so now. I fly 5-6 different airlines for work travel and donât have status on them all to get free wifi on each of them. This app is how I fill about 90% of my time on flights as itâs general learning mechanics and style is engaging and helpful. Offline mode coupled with airplane mode have also helped me use this app for several hours without much battery drain, a massive plus. No offline mode will cause me to have to look elsewhere for my studying needs. Please fix this development strategy as I love your app over all the others by far.
I donât know how much point there is adding my voice to the chorusâthe extent of your miscalculation should already be clear. While the official courses are cute, and no doubt useful for beginners in the worldâs major languages, they are useless to advanced learners in any language and to those of us who, for whatever reason, want or need to learn the less-spoken languagesâCzech, sayâthat you will never ever get to. The huge array of community courses, on the other hand, has been utterly invaluable.
If you change course and find a way to continue supporting community courses through a mobile app with offline mode, I will happy reinvest in a Pro subscription. Otherwise, I will join those taking their clicks and their course-creation labor to sites that better recognize their strengths, and better value their users.
I sure hope the decks website will be better then the current website for mobile. I just tried the current website on my ipad, and when typing the onscreen accent characters show up, but when i type my onscreen keyboard pops up and covers them, so its a horrible experience with having to popup and minimize my keyboard 3 times per word. It also takes twice as long for it to recognize the answer compared to the app
the current version does not function very well on tablets, indeed, but that is the fault of the various tablets as well, I think - they are not exactly friendly with regard to ânormalâ browsers. Anyhow, the memrise design - huge blank spaces and huge tabs for courses etc, as to fit a phone screen - is terrible with tablets !!! I had to bring in my userscripts from the laptop (Memrise, do you hear? your promise about Decks being mobile friendly? working well with tablets? some user controlled customization would help )
Try holding your tablet in book mode (vertical), then you have both the keyboard and the bar. Also, Iâve made the keyboard a little smaller than default. Still the page looked terrible.
(until now, Iâve used only a 11ââ windows tablet with memrise, but with both firefox and with a privacy oriented chrome fork, so; sorry if it does not fit)
Yes, itâs currently a bit âclunkyâ on my iPad but at least the Memrise people know that they need to do some work on it. Letâs see what they come up with.
As you say, switching from landscape to portrait solves the problem of viewing both the tabletâs keyboard and the Memrise âin-browser keyboardâ for the special characters at the same time. But that creates a different problem for people like me who have fingers the size of sausages because it reduces the size of the keys and I have to be extra careful not to tap the wrong key.
Also, I either have to remember to change my keyboard settings to switch off âauto-capitalisationâ before a session or I have to remember to hit the âshiftâ key at the start of almost every answer so that I get the necessary lower-case character for the first one!
They may find it difficult to solve all these issues for both phones and tablets.
My 2 cents: Memorion is a great app. For the people who study offline there is not a better alternative. The support from the creator is also great.
What is Memorion?
⢠an ads-free, universal flashcard learning program
⢠based on an advanced âspaced repetitionâ algorithm
⢠10-50 times more efficient than memorizing paper flashcards
⢠has FREE vocabulary in 33 languages built-in, 700-1200 words each
⢠has many, many functions (see below)
⢠it has extensive help functions
⢠the user interface is English only
Functions:
⢠true multi-directional learning with flashcards
⢠7 fun game modes (hang-man, multiple-choice, listening to numbers,âŚ)
⢠up to 8 text fields per card (to use for gender, examples, extra images, web links etc.)
⢠card stacks can be downloaded from Anki, Quizlet
⢠designed for large databases (I have >20 000 cards in mine), with multi-level sub-stacks
⢠27 charts to document the learning progress
⢠multiple-choice, whiteboard, different keyboards and audio-recording as answer options
⢠wizards for image searches, photos, audio recording and translations
⢠Cloze texts fully supported
⢠import files from Anki, AnyMemo, text, MS Word, and Excel
⢠fully integrated dictionaries from the Open Dictionary API Alliance (PONS, SlovoEd, etc.)
⢠dictionary support for Google Translate, PONS and Leo online, ColorDict, dict.cc and 100+ others from Langenscheidt, VOX etc.
very unlikely thing to do.
Codswallop!