Possible to merge forum into website?

Heya, just wondering, as Decks is closing so Memrise will be the center, is it possible to merge the forum into the memrise site itself? It would be a lot handier , easier to access and also easier for new users to see and use! Kind of like duolingo, a forum like that would be very nice in the Memrise community, what do you guys think? E.g, there would be a forum button next to like, say the Groups button, people would immediately know where to go, instead of finding it at the bottom of the site in very small lettering :slight_smile:

Please comment on what you think!

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The Memrise forum is based on Discourse. I’d thus doubt that it would be possible to integrate it into Memrise. But I think it should be possible to at least integrate a link into courses so each course has their own thread here on the forum. This has been suggested several times already, if I’m not mistaken.

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Oh right, my bad then, but maybe it would be cool to have a button with an embedded link next to groups directing to here? That would be helpful then being at the bottom!

Just realised you are a leader now! Just wanted to say congrats, as back when I was on a bit, you were still only a regular :slight_smile: Didn’t know until now

Yes, I suggested that myself quite some time ago. But with things as they are I suppose the forums are way down on the list of priorities …

LOL. Those badges don’t really mean a thing, do they! But being a “leader” (whoever came up with that term!) has the advantage of being able to move postings from one thread to another which is quite handy. :slight_smile:

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I remember years ago forums were integrated into individual courses. I found it so helpful because I had made mistakes in my courses and other users were able to instantly bring it to my attention. It’s very unfortunate that there is no official way for users to provide feedback. Yes, I could make a forum post here but only serious users would make the effort to search and write in a forum here.

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Yes, I wasn’t a user back then, but seems like it was pretty helpful! Wish it could be like that again

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Once upon a time, Memrise did indeed run its own forums, right on memrise.com. It was that way for years. And it was one of the backbones of the community and the ability to create and maintain community-supported courses. Then Memrise decided user-contributed courses and the community weren’t important, and one of the things that led to is that they decided maintaining their own forum software was not worth the effort. So they set up this third party software that isn’t so well suited to Memrise, and shut down the old forums - deleting a huge amount of extremely valuable content when they did so, BTW.

On the old system, each course had its own forum, and there was a link from the course to the forum. Of course that was only on web, because Memrise started not caring about the community around the same time they started seriously pursuing mobile, so they never bothered to add forum links to mobile. Lots of new users, who used the mobile app only and never visited the web site, didn’t even know about the memrise forums, and that was actually one of the arguments memrise gave when they explained why they were shutting it down! They actually said that it wasn’t worth the effort to support something only web users used, when they wanted to focus on mobile users - even though the reason most mobile users didn’t use the forums was because memrise themselves didn’t bother to show the forums to mobile users. Hah.

One reason the old forums were so integral to the community, and to supporting user-created courses, was because users knew where to post to get the attention of the maintainer of a course. And course maintainers knew where to post to communicate with the people taking their course, and knew where to see what those users had to say or ask or suggest. By the mere fact of every course having its own forum, with a prominent link right from the course, it created a place where maintainers and users of the course knew they could find and communicate with each other, and that confidence led to people actively using it. Of course some courses were abandoned, but people could see that right away, and sometimes they asked to take over those courses.

Each course having its own forum also facilitated improvements to the course, because of this engagement.

But in addition to that, it also gave a very very easy to see history of discussions about that course. Any user looking at a new course could skim through its forum and see common questions and answers, see how active the maintainers were, and so on.

This new third party forum system just plain doesn’t work for that. Courses are effectively orphaned from engagement. A very active course maintainer can make themselves known on these forums, and some of their users who may have been looking at the forums anyway, will find them. But most of their users won’t. And the forum posts won’t be used as a running log of discussion about a specific course, and people know that, so they won’t try to use them that way.

If Memrise is serious about being a platform for user-contributed courses and community around those again, it really does need to restore per-course forums, automatically created for every course, and linked prominently from the course on all platforms. It was the lifeblood of being able to build a course and engage with the people taking it. But Memrise already had that, and made a deliberate decision to delete it and probably lost the code. Are they going to reconsider that awful decision?

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I think it would be just fine to create a new forum as part of the custom editing view – no need to force forums to each and every course. Then the good course creators would of course create a forum and the bad courses and editors not bothering to get feedback would just get a lesser audience.

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The worst about Duolingo is IMHO the quite limited forum where they focus on NEW posts…but where old postings are not shown or updates (only admin/moderators see this).

Their used software is missing the most standard functionality used today on modern forums.

Like:

  • user tagging
  • See replies to your own answers (notifications)
  • see / order posts by “last recent updates / 24h”
  • Seeing timestamps
  • private messaging (Memrise vensupports to invite multiple users into a private discussion) for forum users
  • limited sub forum usage with missing of several sub forums or sub groups: The general “Duolingo(English)” or “Troubleshooting(English)” sub forum s more used like a trashcan.

I also liked Lingvist’s community forum (which also supported user tagging and to get in touch with staff directly) but it is gone, sadly to say.

I really hope that the Memrise staff sticks to a good forum software (like it is right now) with FULL support of showing the recent/updated threads rather then to invent something that it so much limited like the “Duolingo discussion forum” where old but good threads regularly disappear into nirvana never to be found again.

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“Sentence discussions” or course related questions is something different than the usage of “normal question/discussion threads” like the general “Duolingo(English)” forum is being used for and I enjoy to have something big as the Memrise community forum currently is.

Duolingo has a strong focus on the “sentence discussions” where you can click the “Discuss” button but lacks in the other parts for other “normal” threads.

…(…)…

What I would like to see on Memrise:

A report option - like Duolingo has it - as a learner to actively notify the course owner and (not visible) contributors directly about errors or missing synonyms or alternatives (especially when you construct your own sentences with 100% typing on the web).

IMHO it needs to be easier and more straightforward to apply / add changes to a course…this probably wouldn’t hurt…at least for the learners as not everyone runs into the same issues (errors or missing accepted synonyms/alternatives) again and over again and you can start integrating course improvements as soon as implicit reports are flowing into the report queue system.

Back in 2017 and 2018 I started to create a notepad textfile about “Learn PT BR Basics” and PT BR 1-3 “not accepted translations” (e.g. I saw how some words were used in the user-created Duolingo PT BR vocabulary clone course) and continued a bit to write them down for the later (4) 5-6 PT BR courses as well but not to the same extend.

Example:
If courses by owners like “Memrise team” and others are only designed as courses in mind of no typing / multiple-choice (or tapping), then this can backfire at learners as soon as they want to make use of “all typing” Tampermonkey userscripts on the Memrise web portal and do classic reviews with 100% (free) typing in a textfield.

For any reason (I am not in contact with Portuguese native speakers and I have no tutor) I never reviewed my written notes and started new comments in the related threads to be discussed publicly with the Memrise course moderators.

Am I the only one?
Has this happened also to other learners?

This course support (with a report queue directly visible to the owner/contributors) could be used if there is no need to heavily discuss some missing synonyms or alternative sentences which should be obvious to be either accepted or denied.

If denied:
The Memrise system should log the rejected report with an additional detail explanation (optional) from the course owner / contributor why exactly it is wrong and immediately show that message the next time and the refuse state to the other learner who maybe tries to report this “(wrong) solution” once again.

In my case, I would have had at least the chance to immediately report those missing answers / synonyms back in 2017 or 2018 when using the courses actively as soon as I came over some answer rejections.

3 years later I am finally back at reviewing ALL of the 7 PT BR course series regularly.
I will have to carefully check my written notes one day or complete them as they usually tackled multiple courses at once
(word was accepted in course X and level Y, used in this form in course X, but in course Y it is different / not accepted for any reason).

If I will ever find the nerves to publish them on the forum in the related course threads once I could polish/verify them again…I am not that sure about this :slight_smile:

…(…)…

It is good that there also is the support to discuss a course in a dedicated (single) thread to bring up some new ideas (if you are a bit insure) or ask why a sentence is in the way it was written / constructed in the target language or translated back to fully understand the meaning.

I guess I will have to start doing this with some basic questions in my 50languages course where I sometimes find some odd sentence translations or missing words and I do not really understand why it is that way.
In this case it is not enough to simply “flag sentences” or report errors or missing “alternative answers”.

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I agree with this idea! Yes

When every course had its own forum, it encouraged the people taking a course to connect with each other and support each other in using the course, even if the creator had abandoned it. It sometimes led to new people taking over the course, because they saw that other people were interested (and because they themselves stayed interested due to help from others). But this only happened because the forum link was there to send people interested in the course to look at the forum, and to see what others were saying. If the course didn’t have its own forum, few people would have bothered to post about a course that they didn’t see anyone else posting about, and there would not have been engagement. It was extremely useful to have a forum as part of every course. And why not have that? If you have a system where every course can have a linked forum, it’s easier to make it automatic, than to make it optional. The code is simpler, the UI is simpler.

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Yes but this should not be enforced, rather a button for the course creator to add a forum.

Actually any course creator could today create a course in the forum section under a language. But yes, the link to the forum is missing for finding it from the actual course is missing, so that could be handy.

That would be bad since it would leave users without a forum if the creator didn’t think of it, or didn’t know about it, or was just absent. Course forums were very useful for the people taking a course even if the creator was absent, and they sometimes led to someone new adopting an abandoned course. It’s just added complexity in the software and the user interface (having to design for the case where there is a forum and where there is no forum) and it gives no advantages whatsoever.

Can one actually do that?

When these forums launched, they told us we could create a post for a course, so that people could comment on that post, but that’s very different from having a forum for the course, where people can post on different topics and each post can have its own comments. If it were actually possible to create a forum for a course, I would have done that for my courses - even without the link, and even without most users knowing there even are forums to look for, it still would’ve been better than nothing. But it was not possible to do.

I just browsed the existing forums and I don’t see any forums for specific courses, nor could I find a way to create one. Yet you seem to be saying it can be done. Are you saying that? If so, can you point me to how to do it?

Automatic forum creation does not mean that the course creator will look at it. If those are created by the course creator itself there’s a chance it’s looked at. Just an option up front is all we need, and also that the forum could be created at any time.

See http://community.memrise.com/c/decks-courses/7 – if you have a course you could create a forum topic there today.