[Several years ago, in their leap to mobile and memrise-sponsored language courses, Memrise made a series of changes that completely broke many, perhaps even most, of the community courses. Many course creators spent hundreds of hours of their own time building and supporting those courses. In the hopes that Memrise might decide to care about about a platform for community courses again, I’m going to post some feedback here about the biggest categories of breakage they could fix. This post is part of that series. If Memrise takes these posts seriously, and responds seriously, that could be an indication that they care about this again.]
Background:
On Memrise of old, when a course creator/editor put an answer in their database with commas in it, those commas separated a list of alternative allowed answers. For example, if the answer in the database was “hello, goodbye” then the person taking the course could answer either “hello” or “goodbye” or “hello, goodbye” to get it right.
On Memrise of old, when a course creator/editor put an answer in their database with part in parentheses, that part was considered optional. For example, if the answer was “(a) land”, the person taking the course could answer either “land” or “a land” and get it marked right.
Some course creators made extensive use of these features, putting hundreds of answers that used commas or parentheses in their courses. Then, one day, as part of their leap to focusing only on memrise-created courses, Memrise just changed both of these without any warning. Suddenly, you had to type the entire answer exactly was it was in the database to get it right. “a land” was now wrong; only “(a) land” would do. “hello” was now wrong, only “hello, goodbye” was now right. And worse, for comma-separated lists, even if you remembered all the answers, you now had to remember what order they were in. “goodbye, hello” is not correct when the answer is actually “hello, goodbye”.
There was an uproar on the old forums the day this happened, and someone from memrise support took notice and fixed the bug. Then he came back soon after to apologize and say he’d been instructed to restore the “bug” because it wasn’t actually a bug. Memrise had decided that their courses couldn’t work with the old way of handling commas and parentheses, so they’d make the change. Large numbers of community-created courses were damaged by this, because it’s now too annoying to try to remember things the course creator never intended for you to have to learn (such as the order of words in a comma-separated list).
My reef fish course is one of the courses heavily affected by this,
For example, now even if you can identify a fish species, you now have to remember the phase, which I didn’t intend for you to have to remember, but worse, you have to remember how I typed it. If one species’ juvenile is in the database with “(juvenile phase)” at the end but another’s juvenile has just “(juvenile)”, you have to remember that. I wasn’t careful to be consistent with those because you were only supposed to have to type the species name, not remember how I worded the phase.
While it is possible for a course creator to go through their course and look at database entries one by one to fix some of these problems, it can be really hard and is certainly time consuming for large courses. Many course creators weren’t even on Memrise anymore, and many others just didn’t bother to invest even more time, not knowing what Memrise might break next.
What Memrise should do:
Memrise should do exactly what I suggested at the time: Make this a per-course setting. On an individual course, the creator or editor would have a toggle to either interpret commas and parentheses the old way, or not.
Next, Memrise would run a one-time backfill job that would automatically toggle this to the old way for any community-created course that was created before the change happened, and which has not been edited since then. Those are courses that can be assumed to have been created with the assumption that commas and parentheses would work like that, and whose creators have stopped maintaining them, so we know they haven’t manually repaired them. With this one change, Memrise would automatically repair all of these courses without having to spend a lot of time looking at each one.
Even better would be to allow this to be set for each level, but that’s more work and memrise probably won’t be interested. But it would be nice.
“Repair the community posts” series:
1 - Repair the community courses, 1: "multimedia" levels
2 - Repair the community courses, 2: commas and parentheses
3 - Repair the community courses, 3: Show one photo, not all
4 - Repair the community courses, 4: Course forums
