Reporting a points farming course

I understand that you are new here, and probably very enthusiastic and idealistic about Memrise, but you should be realistic in your expectations, and understand the inherent limitations of a site like this that allows, and even depends on, user-generated courses.

You have to realize that for every junk course like this that you find, there are probably dozens of equally pointless publicly visible courses that you haven’t found yet, and probably thousands more private courses that you will never find, but what harm do those junk courses cause to you or me?

Yes, people can use them to “cheat” and get points that they don’t deserve, but due to the client-server based nature of Memrise, cheating on points will always be possible for those who want to cheat, and creating a junk course is not even the easiest way to cheat.

Memrise has very limited staff, and they have a difficult time just managing to keep the whole site from breaking every time they want to add a feature, or make a minor change. Just recently, the web courses were virtually unusable for almost two weeks, after the management ordered changes to the site.

In my opinion, the paying customers and content creators are much more likely to leave Memrise because of major functional deficiencies and technical failures, rather than because of these junk courses that can be found scattered here and there on the site.

As a very long-term Memrise user, I would much rather see the staff spend their time on fixing and improving core site functions, rather than wasting their time in an unwinnable cat and mouse game of chasing cheaters.

I have no objection to reporting these courses in the appropriate way when you do come across them, and if the staff care, and if they have spare time to check and remove them, then they can remove them to keep the course lists from getting overrun with garbage. But I think it’s important to understand that this type of housekeeping activity is likely to be a very low priority activity for the Memrise management and staff.

5 Likes

I am a software engineer and systems architect with more than ten years in the industry. I am not unsympathetic to the challenges of keeping the database clean of such garbage. However, having new people find these sites definitely tarnishes the brand. The solution is not to just throw up your hands in surrender.
If the problem is a lack of manpower, then perhaps the solution is too. By this, I mean to give users the ability to down vote and have the Level 1 staff (the lowest level staff) review any question set which gets some number of down votes.

It’s not surrender to defer action and ignore things that are objectively a very low priority, in fact, it’s a very intelligent use of limited business resources. Memrise is not Facebook or Twitter, with hundreds of “Level 1 staff”. The staff at Memrise numbers in the tens of people, in total. And the staff who help out on the forum with these types of housekeeping tasks also have real work to do in the office, such as handling business correspondence, making copies, managing supplies, answering phones, etc. It is a very tiny operation.

If they follow through with your proposal to give users the ability to down-vote courses, then they would have to assign their systems analyst to design the system, and programmers to implement it, taking time away from other tasks. The first three or four versions they roll out wouldn’t work, and peoples’ courses would get lost in the mess.

Then when your proposed system finally works correctly, the trolls would just get their kicks by down-voting a bunch of courses manually, or writing a script to down-vote hundreds of courses per minute. Then the same tiny staff will be stuck looking at a mountain of useless reports every morning, and wasting time that could be spent on much more productive tasks that actually benefit users and produce profit for the company.

2 Likes

If things that tarnish the brand are permitted to endure, it will impact the growth of the company.

Memrise is a fantastic resource, offering hundreds of excellent courses, on a very impressive range of subjects, all completely for free. Memrise has every reason to be proud of what they and their users have created here. The existence of some random garbage courses does nothing to tarnish “their brand”.

Memrise is not responsible for those courses that random users created, and has nothing to apologize for.

Wasting your time fretting over junk courses and cheaters instead of finding and taking courses you enjoy is like going to the Louvre and staring down at the floor and fretting over the dust-balls in the corner of the room, whilst ignoring the great works surrounding you everywhere.

I suggest that you focus on the great and positive things on offer here, and ignore the insignificant noise of junk courses and cheaters. If you do so, you will enjoy your stay here much more.

5 Likes

You all realize that the course creator is 13 years old?

This is a site that allows a 13-year-old to create a course. I like that about Memrise.

Empowering students to own their own learning is never a “tarnishing” of the Memrise brand.

This is not a crook. This is child’s play.

1 Like

in the past, when some user pointed at such courses, the memrise team answered immediately and said “thanks for letting us know”.

i agree it is not indeed “tarnishing” anything, but constantly lecturing people on how to think and feel is not very nice either…

A 13-year-old didn’t create a course. He created a point farm. “Course” implies something educational.

Also, I think you all are missing my point. The issue is not whether or not I ignore this point farm. The issue is that these kinds of things chase away potential patrons.

You may not like it. You may gripe that it is ‘unfair’ or focusing on the dustballs in the Louvre. You’ve got a right to your opinion and I’m not going to criticize it. But, the idea that a new user exposed to point farms like this early on isn’t going to have their perception of the brand altered negatively because of it, simply doesn’t conform to my professional experience.

2 Likes

This is my first reply to anything, so pls dont be too harsh on me if i’m wrong.

The link up there is to a course that I found on someone that friended me and I found this course on the number 1 titled “free points.”

I think that this course was mentioned in here previously… but now i think it came up again.

Hello,
I’m sorry that I’m posting here after almost a year since the last post was written.

Free Points - Memrise
Free Points !!! - Autor: GabinXD - Memrise

Interesting thing: some guy takes part in those courses, he has obtained about 350,000,000 (!) points in one week with 370 words.

A task for Memrise Team?

@MemriseSupport. Please delete this course and the ones listed above. They are spammy and waste the site’s resources.

Also:

Wow. The list goes on and on. I’m just doing a casual search on “free points”. There are just so many of them that I don’t want to continue pasting links here.

Hi @johnastsang, thanks for bringing this to our attention. We’ll review the list and take appropriate actions.

Best,
A.

1 Like