Memrise NEWS, ANNOUNCEMENTS and UPDATES

[Arete_Hime (Ultra-Sadist Delinquent)]

This is the place to put all news and announcements coming out of Memrise that are relevant or interesting to a majority of course creators or users. Any major changes to the functionality of the site or app can also be put here.

Please link to the original content when you paste it here, or quote it directly.

If you are Memrise staff and want to give an update but do not want to start a dedicated topic you can also leave a comment here.

This is not a place for discussion. For that go to the discussion topic. To keep this topic focused on its purpose I will move or edit all posts that I feel warrant it.

[Arete_Hime (Ultra-Sadist Delinquent)]

In course creation the comma no longer works as a separator, instead: [quote=“BenWhately, post:133, topic:6145, full:true”]
… “;” and “/” are the separators that should work at the moment and will permanently.
[/quote]

A chart explaining the way that different separators will work from now on:

Has there been a change in the way memrise treats commas?

[image] I hope that this chart will explain.

If you want more details on memrise punctuation:

A Guide to Typing Tests, Tapping Tests and Memrise Punctuation

Hi All - There’s recently been some changes to Memrise Punctuation and how it behaves. We’ve compiled a summary explaining the changes, and how punctuation currently works on Memrise How to Use This Guide Each point will provide a description on how the punctuation works, and then an example of what you need to do to gain a correct answer (when answering a test.) This can be used by someone who wants more information on how to gain said correct answer, or by a course creator …

@hung-phan is in the linked thread helping course creators with the transition. He has also written a userstyle (and a script?) to easily edit the affected courses.

@hung-phan

You can post the links of your courses here, and we will plan for it. In the meantime, if you need any help, you can tag me to the conversation to let me understand the situation. I will try the best I can to help

@neoncube has also written a userscript that allows course creators or contributors to automatically replace commas in their courses with semicolons.

@neoncube

This userscript goes through a course and, in each primary answer, changes any commas to semicolons.

@BenWhately explaining the change:

@BenWhately

Hi everyone, and my apologies for the confusion over this and the annoyance it has caused.

Memrise has changed dramatically over the last two years. After four years of steady growth, we shifted focus away form user-created courses on the website, and moved towards courses that we create ourselves, which are mainly learned on mobile. This led to explosive growth, taking us from a couple of million to tens of millions of users. A problem that comes alongside this growth is that we are now constantly balancing the needs of the 90%+ of our users who have joined in the last 2 years, and are learning on the Memrise-created courses, and the smaller numbers - often long term users - who are learning on flashcard decks created by themselves and the community. These are really two different products that we are supporting on the same technical infrastructure. Problems arise when the needs of the two groups collide - as they have done here.

On the Memrise courses we’re working on a lot of improvements in content and in new test types for testing from words used in the context of sentences. Where sentences have commas in them - as they often do - these tests get broken if commas are also used to divide up correct answers. Since there are multiple other ways to divide up correct answers, we’re discontinuing the use of commas as separators of answers. I do fully realise how annoying this is if you have a course that uses commas as separators already, and are faced with manually changing all the commas to semi colons. I am doing it for the HSK courses I made at the moment, so I do know exactly what is involved.

We certainly should have communicated this clearly and in advance, and we will now make sure we communicate the expected behaviour clearly. My apologies for all of this annoyance.

Ben

On development of the website:

@BenWhately

@alanh beyond continuing to support it and make sure it runs as smoothly as possible, we don’t have near term plans for big new developments. As our userbase and profitability has grown we have been able to expand our team a lot in the last 12 months. If we continue this path over the next 12 months then we will reach a point where we have the capacity to actively develop new features for the website. My gut feeling at the moment is that at that point we would increase the distinction between the mobile apps with the game-rich product purpose and the website with the more intense study, flashcard feel. But that is a long way from a clear decision - just a reflection of my personal current feeling, fwiw.

@BenWhately

@DW7 yes, the long term community if hugely important to us, not least jus ton a personal level that we have shared so much with you all over the last 6 years and have benefitted so much from your help and enthusiasm. That is why it is my intention that as we expand the team we can put more resources into making the site for user generated courses better and better. But in order to get there we need to solidify and grow the business as fast as we can. In the short term that is happening through our own courses and through the apps. That is the pragmatic reason for the short term focus, but it doesn’t change our long term commitment to people like you who have helped so many people over the years through the courses you create and maintain on Memrise.

@BenWhately

@pdao thank you for your support, it is deeply appreciated. We certainly don’t always get it right when we make changes - particularly in our communication. But we are pouring all our life’s work and energy into making Memrise as good as it possibly can be, and support like yours (and many others on this thread) means a great deal.

[misxifRM]

It appears that the web version of Memrise now automatically advances from a Tapping test to the next question when the answer is completed correctly - ie, without it being necessary to press the Enter key.

I believe that this is a reversion to behaviour that was working up to about two months ago, and this behaviour is a fairly close parallel to operation of the mobile apps on Tapping tests.

I have observed this in the course http://www.memrise.com/course/47049/5000-words-top-87-sorted-by-frequency/garden/difficult/, but I presume this is a general change.

I am making this comment just as a user and I have no information about Memrise new version releases. As a user, I would very much appreciate official announcements by Memrise when changes are made.

[misxifRM]

The operation of Tapping seems to be changing under my feet. Just now, doing the Tapping test on the web version, anything from a dash ‘-’ onwards is ignored, since the result is considered correct when only the partial answer has been given and the test is automatically advancing to the next one.

[alanh]

Impact of re-introduction of ‘autocorrect’ function on tapping tests:

Tapping Tests - Recent Change

Hi @Joshua, Is the change pointed out by @misxifRM in Memrise NEWS, ANNOUNCEMENTS and UPDATES, where correct answers to tapping tests are automatically accepted without the need to press “Enter” a bug (maybe as an unintended consequence) or was it an intentional change in behaviour? I encountered it today in Spanish (Spain) 4. I preferred the previous behaviour because it made you think about whether you had selected the correct order of words. As it is, since the change back, you can get a …

Joshua мσиѕтєя мυиςнєя αт мємяιѕє 16 Dec 2016

"The autocorrect function was removed a while ago due to some issues we were facing with the Tapping / Typing changes.

The feature has been now been brought back into action.

The decision was to make it function like the auto correct for tapping test in mobile. It means it will check every input of user against the possible answers. If it is correct, then you’ll proceed to the next test."

[Hydroptere (Overlord Hydroptère)]

another thing that the Memrise team forgot to mention is that they are “restructuring” courses, which can lead to users’ progress being lost: Russian 1 Course Progress Lost and parts missing

edit: this in the general context of the items counter behaving erratically - I should be on 73,000 learnt items, on monday i was 72, 800 and soemthng, before yesterday i had 72,669 but today 72163

[RedEyedTreeFrog (Ngaju Germany)]

On the begin of 2017 there will come a Japanese Latin script course and Japanese 4-7 too. Furthermore it will come a Polnish and Arabic course in German, but I don’t know when and if it in English too, but I think so. I will know more in some days.

[Arete_Hime (Ultra-Sadist Delinquent)]

@Joshua

The “top secret leaderboard” has been removed from the site. As far as I know, there are no current plans to bring it back.

http://www.memrise.com/top-secret-global-leaderboard/

Discussion topic:

Global leaderboard

The global leaderboard is not available today.

Community effort to create an alternative:

User-Created Global Leaderboard II

Some history: In early Memrise days, year ago, there was a public global leaderboard. There were so many complaints about hacking and cheating, that Memrise decided to hide the leaderboard. Later (2012?) community members liked the idea of a top-50 list, and began assembling the list in a thread in the community forum. Members on the forum proposed names and the number of points they had. By consensus, the top-50 list as built in the forum excluded certain members whose scores didn’t seem to r…

[DW7 (Meminence, Rank 15 &)]

Thanks for posting that here.

[JBorrego (Jesus)]

Memrise Release Notes - 27 Jan 2017

Dear Agents! In an effort to improve our communication with you, we are turning this space into a dedicated channel to inform you of the constant changes and improvements that have an impact on the way you experience Memrise. In addition to relevant updates, we’ll also try to communicate future releases as early as we can, so that you are aware and prepared for changes in the website’s functionality. In the last few weeks, the crew here at Memrise’s HQ has been working hard on general performa…

[neoncube]

I just noticed that when learning new words, in addition to the level number, it also displays the word’s numbers that are included in the level. For example, when learning new words from the HSK Level 6 course, I see “Learn 5 new words HSK Level 6 - 501 - 525”.

(I think the “501 - 525” part is new)