Make 3 million points in 5mn

How is it possible to make 3.000.000 points in five minutes? The user 'extremedream made it. I don’t mind but I think this user should be penalised.

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Forget … Here just give you attention when you pass the number of your credit card.

Esquece… Aqui só te dão atenção na hora de você passar o número do seu cartão de crédito.

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I also think that this cheater should be banned.

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There’s no way that possible. This person is obviously cheating.

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It’s probably not going to happen. People have bought up this user before as a (potential) cheater and Memrise still hasn’t done anything about it.

This is getting very annoying indeed. :rage:
As I mentioned previously, analysing the data to prove someone is definitely cheating, is rather time consuming and not the most efficient use of our time and limited resources.
Due to the severity of this case however, we will look into it soon.
I need a bit of help from our developer so please bear with me for a couple of weeks.

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O caso do tal do HFGW era ainda mais descarado.

Bastaria olhar que os pontos totais estavam subindo sem que os pontos semanais e mensais mudassem.

Estava claro e óbvio que era ROUBO. Mas agora, pelo que vi, ele parou de roubar.

The case of such the HFGW was even more brazen.

It would be enough look that the total points were rising without weekly and monthly points changed.

It was clear and obvious that it was STOLEN. But now, from what I saw, he stopped stealing.

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The Weekly/Monthly scores on a course leaderboard aren’t a reliable indicator. The user may have stopped learning/reviewing a certain course in which case their weekly/monthly scores for that course aren’t increasing.
As they may still be learning dozens of other courses, their overall score will keep rising.
Establishing whether someone is cheating requires investigation. We need to determine where their points come from and match those with their time spent learning on the web, ios app and/or android app. Reviewing items ready for review (150 points per item), practicing items (5 points/item), learning (45 points/item), accuracy bonus, listening skills review, difficult word review, … to name a few.
We will not deactivate accounts or remove points without the necessary proof to backup our actions.

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Lien, thank you for acknowledging the concerns. I understand that investigating can be time consuming.

Here’s a gift that can save you and the developer some time: You don’t actually need to add up all of the different places that this user has earned points. You can simply look at the points accrued in one or two courses and see that they don’t make sense.

Consider two courses:

(1) First on the user’s course list is: http://www.memrise.com/course/189580/curso-completo-de-ingles-full-audio/ ,in which he has 61 million points. He appears to be in second place, so maybe that’s not unreasonable.( I can’t help but wonder whether this second place standing is where your investigation stopped.) BUT WAIT - the user in first place in that course has ALREADY been investigated by Memrise and those points were removed! Don’t let the 2nd place standing dissuade you from further investigation.

(2) Another course: http://www.memrise.com/course/112757/english-prepositions-4/ has 159 items, and the course leader has 27million points in that course. That is 170 THOUSAND points for each item in that course.

You’ve listed several ways that users can accumulate points and bonuses. And clearly, members may accumulate points in private courses, or by speed testing, or by repeatedly quitting and re-starting a course. But none of those methods work out to earning more than 100,000 points per word in a course. He’d have to have taken the course hundreds of times.

So there you go - you really wont have to spend a lot of time to investigate and address this particular situation.

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Oh really?

In a particular course only the total score it increases and this is normal?

And looking at the overall ranking, strangely, the same magic occurs.

Close this topic too, as did others, and do not have to pretend you’re worrying about it.

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Thanks! We still need to extract the data in case of a dispute. As soon as I get my hands on the required scripts, I’ll remove as many points as I can (every single one of them if it’s up to me).

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@Lien ~ As this issue probably will never either go away, or be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction, can I offer a suggestion ? I am not sure if someone has already posed this, but I don’t have hours to read through all the various posts on this issue. I assume someone has already mentioned this, since my brain doesn’t usually think of new things anymore.

I know Memrise is adverse to adding any new functionality, especially if it is user prompted, but maybe in this instance, creating some kind of ability to allow users to filter out which users they do not want to see on a (global or individual) leaderboard might be helpful. Something like the ability we now have to ignore a word in a course. We can turn it on if we choose, or not use that functionality. No one knows whether we use it or not, it is a users option (and a great one at that !) I’m not programmer savvy, so I don’t know how this works, except at the theoretical level.

If somehow users could “ignore” usernames on leaderboards, it might provide the following:

  1. Free up Memrise staff from ever having to spend time investigating user course history/activities.

  2. Allow users to do whatever they want (even score a bazillion points it they feel so inclined) but somehow know that not everyone will notice what they are doing since they may have been filtered out (thereby reducing some of the “thrill” factor).

  3. If users could filter out a username at their own discretion, no accusatory fingers are pointed at anyone in public, either fairly or unfairly. There would be no more need to come to the forum and air the dirty laundry in public. Users could simply take care of things at home (by filtering out names that rub someone the wrong way on a leaderboard).

  4. If users could filter out a username, users who try to use Memrise in a fair and ethical manner, would gain a sense of competing against others on a somewhat more equal playing field. Perhaps even be spurred on towards additional learning, and maybe even increase their motivation to help or assist other learners.

There are probably other benefits, but these are the ones that came immediately to mind.

As I stated above, I realize Memrise is adverse to adding new functionality, but something needs to be done, otherwise this issue will just keep rising again. Investigating one or a handuful of users might provide temporary relief, but there will always be others coming down the pike in the future. Ignoring the situation won’t make it go away, and user frustration levels will just increase. It would be nice if Memrise could be proactive. Why not spend the time you would allocate towards investigating cases on programming changes instead ?

I’ll get off my soapbox now…

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@Lien thanks for dealing with this matter.

And by the way, @marciojmendes-HFGW-T was not being hostile or bickering, he was simply stating facts. You have locked several topics related to “ExtremeDream” cheating before. Who is the hostile one?

Thanks, it’s an option, but similar to filtering out inappropriate mems, it’s a fairly complex system to develop (and get it to work on all platforms).

@Lien ~ thank you. Maybe the issue will just go away by itself. Have a good day !

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Hi everyone :wink:

Unfortunately these weird creatures are reproducing!

Since Memrise is not so determined to deal with them, let’s just ignore them.
Let’s wish them normal and sound brains, meanwhile, let those maggots satisfy themselves with the leaderboard’s flesh!

I’m not a pro user yet, so i don’t worry about my security, however, i agree with the idea that Memrise not only should ban these cheaters but also should improve the website’s security.

Just remember one thing. With all that cheating they are not doing themselves a service. They are not learning anything and just have a bunch of numbers to show. Numbers don’t count when it comes to knowledge. They can’t brag that they know a language or whatever they claim to study. :scream:

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If you are not annoyed by “people posting about” the point farmers, and you are annoyed by the point farmers themselves then why lock/delete posts from people posting about point farmers and not actually taking care of these point farmers?