It is extremely difficult to report errors in the information in courses (typically typographical errors) or to make suggestions to course creators for improving a course. Many courses do not have a course forum (with a name starting with “[Course Forum]”), the ones which do exist seem not to be visited very often by the course creators (is there a notification mechanism?), and even when things are working properly, finding a course forum and entering a message in it is rather cumbersome.
The easiest solution to this problem would be to add a private messaging system between members. I imagine this has been discussed before, and there is some reason the site management has decided against it, but I really would like to recommend it. In addition to facilitating error reporting, it would encourage more interaction between users of the site.
If that is simply not going to happen, a better mechanism for reporting errors and for course creators to see those reports needs to be implemented. Ideally, it would be nice to have functionality available on the lesson pages of the courses which would enable a user to report an error in an item in the lesson; the website should automatically put this information wherever it needs to go, and notify the course creator that an error has been reported.
You can message a user by clicking their username anywhere and pressing the blue “Message” button that should pop up with the user’s info. Alternatively, you can do this with any other user, then click the ‘x’ next to their name in the window where you write the message, before manually adding the name of the user you want to send it to.
If I remember correctly, you need to be at a certain ‘trust level’ on the forum to be able to send messages, so if you don’t see the button, you may need to raise that first. Also, you can unfortunately only send messages to users who have joined the forum. There are many absent users who quit Memrise before the forum was released, so you’ll need to request that a staff member try to contact them through email if they aren’t here.
All that said, I would certainly like a more built-in approach too. I still miss the old course forums, personally…
Thanks for the information. I guess I am not at the required “trust level,” since I have never seen such a button. What is the trust level, and how does one increase (or “earn”) it? Also, how in the world are users supposed to find out about these things?
The users in question have not quit Memrise, but I have no way of knowing whether or not they are members of the forum.
All in all, this seems like a weak mechanism for facilitating communication between users.
I guess I wasn’t around to see the “old course forums”-- or maybe I was around, and just never found my way to them. On the whole, the help system at the site is not great. I’ve belonged to a number of language learning and language exchange sites, and I was a software developer for a decade or so. I’m just not very impressed with the structure of this website.
You can find some more details here:
That page is for Discourse as a whole (the system that Memrise uses for these forums), so it’s possible some tweaks have been made since then for Memrise’s forums specifically. I never paid much attention to it initially, so I’m unfortunately not clear on the details myself. I just got high enough to message from using the forums for a week or so. Maybe someone else knows of a page with details specifically for this forum.
You can also ‘tag’ users by typing their name in a post with a “@” preceding it. (For example, @fuonk.) This alerts the user to the post when they next visit the forum, and it has the added use of showing you whether the user has registered to the forum. If their username shows up in the pop-up search when you’re typing after the “@” and it displays in gray when you finish, as you can see above, then they are on the forum.
As far as the structure goes, well…a lot of people agree with you. It could be done better. I think Memrise is a fantastic tool for learning, but they unfortunately haven’t shown much interest in feedback on the forums over the years, so the users mostly have to help one another in finding their way around.
Once again, many thanks for the information. I appreciate it greatly. 
Happy to help! 
If you type the username with an @ and the name gets a greyish background like @fuonk they are members of the forum. If there is no greyish background I usually contact Lien (a staff member) who tries to reach them via email.
Thanks. I just used this when I entered a new topic. By the way, I have apparently now been elevated to “trusted” status.