Over the past several weeks, all of the courses I use which contain pictures have suddenly begun to occasionally show white squares instead of the correct picture. This happens frequently enough that it has rendered these courses unusable.
Is anybody else experiencing this behavior?
See this earlier topic on the subject:
Iāve had a look at two of my courses. One (World Geography) is affected on Anroid but the other (a Finnish course) doesnāt appear to be. On the geography course, the issue only seems to happen when multiple(4) images are shown to select from. In each case I saw, it was one or two of the ādummyā images that were missing.
@James_g_memrise - Can you advise, please?
Iām still affected only on some courses too and canāt work out why.
Sadly I donāt have the original images of courses I support, so Iām unable to reinstate them or try a different format.
I have no further updates. Itās not something we are looking into Iām afraid.
@James_g_memrise Can you elaborate on this decision? Should people just consider any course with pictures in it to be potentially non-functional going forward?
The course creator/editor need to upload new images. There is nothing to be done from our end.
@James_g_memrise Can you or a colleague advise if there is a particular image format that was affected by whatever change you (Memrise) made which caused the problem, please? Then we can avoid those formats when uploading replacements. Thanks.
I donāt believe there was any issue with formats, it was the fact they were stored in the mems folder, which we assumed was people copying links from a mem to make a course.
I donāt have a list of acceptable formats, but if you right click and view image on any working image on the website you should see the format in the filename so you can know they work
I wonder why your system stored some essential course images uploaded into the image column, in a Mems folder?
Even stranger, some levels have missing images or photos and present ones.
I think Iāve previously given some screen shots.
I guess weāll never know.
Iāll have to see what I can do to overcome the missing images (sometime).
@James_g_memrise This is a bit surprising, to be honest. What you seem to be telling customers is that we must:
a) Figure out which courses are affected.
b) Figure out which images in those course are affected by going through them one by one.
c) Figure out how to contact the owners of these courses.
d) Try to encourage them to correct these images even though itās not actually clear how they do this without repeating the same mistake that broke them in the first place.
If weāre unable to do this, these courses become all but useless because all that ends up happening is that the Memrise algorithm ends up considering all these images which we canāt see to be eventually marked as wrong answers during reviews and thus, unanswerable questions become the majority of future reviews.
The kicker of course is that these courses used to work and due to some unannounced change by Memrise, theyāre now broken.
Does this really seem like a reasonable remediation path to the management at Memrise?
There used to be a list of acceptable image formats in the Course Creation āHow Toā area but it no longer appears to be there. Iāll now need to review every item on each of these courses again, delete the new blank files and replace them. Many of my items have (or had) multiple image files attached.
None of the pictures in my image-based courses were copied from mems, so that doesnāt explain why my courses have been affected when Memrise deleted the mems folder. I have already spent a lot of time repairing my broken courses to keep them usable for people since this problem first came to light. Iām now going to have to spend a lot more time on it.
Is @BenWhately still around? If so, Iād be interested to know if he is content with the situation as youāve described it.