I’m so relieved to see this. Thank you so much for hearing us out, Memrise. I had been feeling so upset about this for the past week, and I was making serious plans to (very reluctantly) transition myself over to Anki. I’m happy to suspend those plans for now.
It would be extremely appreciated if you would consider giving us a heads up on changes like this in the future. It’s really not fun to have things like this sprung on you without any warning. As I said in my post on the other topic, I’ve poured many hours into hand-picking items from the wiki in order to import the mems, and it was extremely disheartening to just see a message on the forum casually saying that many months of work were going to be thrown away with no warning. With this update, I’m going to consider (cautiously) going back to business as usual, and I really hope I don’t come to regret it later.
I want to stress how important the community aspect is for me with Memrise. Mems, user-made courses, and the forum are all what really attracted me to Memrise in the first place. They’re what made me want to stay, and they’re what I’d been very, very upset about feeling I would have to abandon in the past week. You’ve got an amazing community here, Memrise, full of passionate, intelligent, helpful people. Please remember that.
As far as the mem moderation goes, what do you think about the ideas that have been proposed about a simple option that users can toggle? When an account’s first made, it can start at ‘off’, so that the user sees no mems, other than those that they’ve made themselves and those that have been approved by the staff. But for users who really benefit from the community mems, it’s as simple as going into the menu and turning it on. The fact of the matter is that you’re dealing with two very different demographics: adults who come here to learn on their own, and really aren’t bothered by the occasional swear word or lewd comment, and children who are being introduced to Memrise through their teachers/parents, and understandably shouldn’t be subjected to such things. I personally believe that offering options on the user’s end really is the best way to accommodate both groups. Another idea that’s been suggested is to just let users report offensive mems. It would take some extra manpower to go through the reports, but I would think that anyone who abuses the system, and makes a bunch of false reports, could be blocked easily enough.
In any case, thank you again for giving us the mems back. It really does make all the difference to me on whether or not I feel I can use Memrise for my learning. 