Memrise Release Notes - 13 Dec 2017

[indrekp]

Wow…

I have been a free user for almost 2 years. I hadn’t even opened the forums yet to complain because it’s a free service :). But this is now just getting beyond ridiculous how Memrise is regularly using its paying users’ money to make the site a bit worse every now and then. And now not just bit but a disastrous update.

“Improvements” that I consider as regression that are inhibiting learning and need to be fixed or made configurable:

1. Dec 13 dashboard - it’s a just disaster. people need to see the words left to review for all courses immediately. And other major issues.
2. Nov 28 auto-accept - make it configurable
3. can’t type sentences - maybe I’m imagining this but I used to be able to type long sentences in German Memrise lessons 1 year ago. Can’t do the same now in Brazilian Portuguese Memrise courses. Just multiple-choise/tapping tests. Make it configurable.

I will also put down some actual improvements I’ve had in mind if you manage to crawl out of this enormous hole you have dug yourself in past weeks:

1. Give user the control over the types of tests. For example I don’t like multiple-choice tests. I think they’re quite useless after the initial learning cycle. I would like to type almost always. But some love those tapping tests. So the learners should have more control over it (not just Memrise and/or the creator of the course).
2. Give more control over intervals on a specific word basis. Like the simplest would be to replace the current accept button with 3 buttons, something like: “remembered it well”, “more or less well”, “not well at all” and adjust the interval of that word accordingly (if it was correct). They could be as alternative/parallel to the current accept-button logic with the middle button working exactly as accept is working right now and submitted by the enter key as right now and having the same interval logic. I.e. Not changing the current behaviour at all for the users that liked the way it was. But giving more options for others. Or just make it simple by letting the user enable/disable this “fancier” functionality in the settings.

I had even been considering becoming paying member not because your site was especially good but more because I’m a software developer myself. But you just invest users money to make it worse. So you see the conflict…

Cheers from Estonia

[Kitthren]

I’m a free user and have a goal of 15 minutes per day. My routine is Review → Speed Review → Learn New Words and repeat until my daily goal is reached.

But I can’t click Review in the More options after already reviewing my words. I want to be able to choose to Review multiple times and not be forced to Learn New Words and be overwhelmed. I guess I also won’t be able to manually choose to Speed Review anymore either?

[UltimateAlfred]

I’m sorry, but this latest UI update was not well thought out.

I can’t see the courses that need reviewing at a glance, and I can’t choose my preferred type of learning/review session without an extra click. By hiding things behind another menu makes using the site really distracting.

Sure, I could get used to it, but I’m going to be wishing that I could just skip that extra click, whether I was a new user or not.

[indrekp]

Some on the forum say that Memrise doesn’t give a rat’s ass about this forum and the web interface but they react quickly to infavourable ratings given for the app.

So it might be worth to download the app and give it a fair rating with a reference to the web interface Dec 13 and Nov 28 updates.

And reevaluate the rating after these issues have been fixed / made configurable or reverted.

[KungaLodro84 (khx333)]

Also looks like they disabled speed learning in the new screen with the new options from the main screen. Speed learning is still available when you go inside the course but I would not be surprised if they removed that one soon.

And I’m a paid customer. Where they remove features for me. I don’t know what to say.

[TinyCaterpillar]

You’ve done it again, Memrise!

The buttons showing how many items to review on a spaced repetition website are gone. The progress bars for streaks are gone, with no way to view them, as far as I know, other than to go through a review session, which is a real PITA when you want to confirm that several different goals are done every day. That’s not even going into all of the issues with the ‘next up’ feature, which many users have already pointed out here.

You say you’re clearing clutter, when in reality, the courses are taking up just as much space as before, but now with a whole lot of empty, white nothing on the screen. But hey, we get to push an extra button to do anything now! That’s fun, right?

The way you treat your users has, over the years, steadily gone from annoying, to frustrating, to downright disgusting. Seriously, are you just trolling us at this point? Was this whole website just a prolonged prank to get people invested in learning and building courses with your site, just so that you can repeatedly pull the rug out from under them later, and pretend that it’s an improvement? It’s an uncharacteristically illogical thing for me to seriously consider, but after observing the way this site operates over the past few years, I can’t help but feel this way.

How in the world do you have the gall to say “Today brings another improvement to memrise.com” after the reaction to the last ‘improvement’? You saw it, yes? You know that an enormous amount of users, including many long-time users like myself, are angry, yes? You ignored it, sure, but I suspect you did see it. Is that statement as deliberate a raised middle finger as it seems to be?

Building my courses on Memrise has been an extremely time-consuming and laborious task. I’ve done it because it felt worthwhile; because I felt I was building something that could help me and other interested users for years to come. I’m having more and more trouble convincing myself to bother anymore these days. Maybe this is your goal. Maybe you are just trying to get users like me to ‘take the hint’ and leave, because we’re not wanted anymore. You seem only interested these days in targeting children who want to play a silly game and pretend that they’re learning something serious, throw some money at it, and then eventually lose interest.

I think I am finally at the point where if I see an alternative to Memrise that I’m happy with, I’m jumping ship. The way you treat all of the people using and supporting your site is downright shameful. I’m enormously invested in this site, so I can’t leave right away, but rest assured I’ll be looking. I’m tired of having to reinvent my studying routine at a moment’s notice. I’m tired of randomly starting my days by reading lengthy threads of (understandably) angry posts, just so I know what the hell’s going on. I’m tired of posting things like this myself, only to be ignored. You are not listening to your users. That is a lie. Otherwise you would not be so consistently going in the wrong direction.

(The old) Memrise may have been what jump started my Japanese studies, but my passion for learning Japanese has, for a long while now, been in spite of Memrise, rather than because of it. At this point, I just long to once again have a healthy learning environment, like how Memrise used to feel for me years ago.

The most frustrating part about all of this? You could change it. Right now. You could stop sabotaging your own site. You could, god forbid, roll back these (I have to believe) intentionally horrible changes, and you could start treating your users with anything other than utter contempt… But you’re not going to, are you? I think the best thing I can hope for at this point is for Memrise to eventually self-destruct, and serve as an example to other companies of what not to do. And that makes me very, very sad after spending so much time here…

Side note: I couldn’t help but cynically laugh out loud when I realized that the ‘next up’ seems to be randomized every time I refresh the page. “fair bit of engineering”. Yeah…

[nojadrik]

Good idea!

[x] add my one star rating in the google playstore.

[Helena_Poly]

Yes, I want to know where my streaks went too!!

[TheFour-GatedDanzig]

The most AMEN post.

AMEN.

AMEN.

[neutralnickname]

You memrise guys must be eating shit or smth. I mean, all the recent changes impose the worst possible UX and only an idiot can’t see that. So I bet you’re a bunch of idiots.

Keep up the good work!

[linkf1]

Sign the petition. https://www.change.org/p/ed-cooke-return-to-the-memrise-we-all-once-loved-where-flowers-grew-on-earth?recruiter=842536155&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=copylink&utm_campaign=share_petition

[Gerben_Rotman58]

While some things may be considered design decisions, I assume the following are obvious bugs or unforeseen effects of the design change:

(1) Cannot see which course has items open for review on course oversight page
(2) Cannot see whether your daily goal has been reached
(3) Streak counter is gone

[Lydia9]

This really takes the mick. I’ve got over 40 courses on the go. I used to be able to scroll and glance at home many words to review and how many difficult words there are and then decide how to approach my vocab my my degree studies. If I have 100 words for course A, but only 2 or 3 words each for courses B, C, D, then I can decide to do twenty minutes focussing on A and come back and do B, C and D later in the day in one go. And so on. It was really handy for planning. Now you expect me to scroll, click, scroll, click, remember the previous number of words for “classic” review in my head (or write down with pen and paper?) more than FORTY TIMES! It used to just take seconds! And it’s not showing speed review for any courses that have no classic review available.

My language studies are my livelihood. And every single update Memrise produces for the website just makes it worse than the great platform I joined in 2015. Don’t you have Beta testers? Why do you not have customer services? Why do you ignore our concerns and never respond to concerns raised on the forums, like this thread?

As soon as my twelve month subscription is coming up for renewal I’m cancelling, unless you guys bloody-well pull your fingers out of your ears (and other areas I could care to mention), stop this naval-gazing and start showing your paying customers some respect. I’m sorry to have to word this so strongly but it is out of the sheer frustration at how unprofessional this payed-for service continues to prove to be. I really want to carry on using Memrise. But fiddling with things that aren’t broken when no-one has asked for leads to these immensely stressful results, not only for professional linguists but all users.

[TinyCaterpillar]

Just a suggestion to help people struggling with the lack of review counts: I strongly recommend taking a look at the ‘Groups’ page, located on the top bar on Memrise.

You can sort your courses however you want, it’s a much more compact and practical design than the main page (especially now), and it seems to (so far ) be unaffected by today’s updates. Here’s a screenshot of mine:

Hopefully it can help keep the site at least usable for some of us for a while longer…

[Minhpd87]

Apparently I’m forced to do whatever Memrise suggested next for my learning, for instant: if the suggested action is learn new words then all other possible actions will be grayed out (in the more button) and inaccessible; what If i don’t want to learn new words, I just want to do an early review ? Why did this happen?

[danielws]

Thanks, TinyCaterpillar! That’s perfect. I see Difficult, Review and Learn with the counts. I’m happy again!

[TinyCaterpillar]

Another workaround: You seem to still be able to use speed review as before, whether it’s greyed out on the home page or not, if you go into the course’s main page and paste “garden/speed_review/” at the end of the url.

I’ll be making bookmarks for each of the courses that I do speed reviews in and hoping that this isn’t an ‘oversight’ that gets corrected later.

[neutralnickname]

THANK YOU! Memrise is useful again (at least for now).

[indrekp]

Thank you for the tip, TinyCaterpillar! This might keep me from switching to Anki for little while longer

[ScrewKanji]

Could you at least make the “handy mode selector” a drop-down menu or something instead of covering my whole screen? I can’t even see how many words I need to review within a course without opening up this screen-covering abomination, which is a nightmare for me since I’m currently learning from & reviewing dozens of courses.
And as far as design goes, the whole site looks like it was made for mobile or tablet use now, complete with the giant buttons, lack of shading and minimalist, flat, windows-10-esque design.
The most frustrating part of this update for me, though, is that in this post you acknowledged that “some people want to have more control over their learning experience”. But instead of giving us what we asked for after the last update and improving the settings menu, you start pushing users into learning the way you want them to, and force us to open up a separate, clunky, screen-covering menu to make our own decision on what to do next, actively taking control away from users.
This update has improved absolutely nothing, and only managed to make the site a more clunky, frustrating experience for the end-user. And as a pro-member and a frequent user of this site, I honestly feel like the people making these decisions and approving these updates aren’t putting any thought into why they’re changing things, and just assume that any change is good. I noticed the fact that I could no longer glance at how many words I had to review in a course within less than a minute of being on this site today, and was immediately frustrated that I now have to open a new menu to see/do what I could have done with just a glance or a single click before this update. So how is it that the people in charge at memrise didn’t take this into account? Do the people making these changes even use their own website?
I’m well aware that the people on this forum, myself included, are a vocal minority of the users of this website, but we’re also the most active users, and the users that care the most about this website’s improvement, or lack thereof. Listen to your community. Stop taking control away from the users, and stop making large changes that affect the entire site without warning to your entire user-base at once.