It would be nice to have the option of noting translation errors or similar small errors (missing audio, wrong spelling and so on) directly in the courses resp. directly on the expression (e.g. using a small “Report error” button). Reporting such small errors via the forum is very cumbersome and means that I have not reported some errors that I have noticed.
I agree. I tend to email the help desk and then they tell me to use the forum. I look at the forum and then I give up. The bug reporting mechanism is cumbersome and opaque.
I have a bunch of bugs and missing functionality in IOS. Very frustrating.
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Hi @SegaLee, @TierradelMar,
The feature did exist, but was discontinued by Memrise around June 2016.
Up till then, each course’s homepage had a Forum button users could click on that would take them directly to the forum for that specific course.
Based on experience with my own courses, forum activity had declined by >95% since the old days.
For example, the forum for a Spanish course I look after (that has 107k subscribers) used to get two or three forum suggestions/comments per week under the old system, but it’s currently down to about one every three months.
@memrisesupport - please could you consider reinstating the pre June 2016 course forum system?
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The old forums were shut down because they were spammed with porn links and phishing schemes. It is difficult to maintain that old quick-and-easy access while also building safe, secure systems.
I have to say that I saw zero evidence of such forum problems in the any of the courses I was actively using at the time, including in the old forums of two very popular Spanish courses I maintain. Maybe I just got lucky.
A problem definitely did show up with bad actors setting up accounts that they then used to ‘follow’ regular users, that had porn links etc. on their personal home pages and in mems. But that had nothing to do with the discussion forums, and the problem appears to have been completely eradicated by Memrise.
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I maintained a few courses using the old forums, and participated in many others, and hardly ever saw any spam. There was one period when a few spammers tried, and they got removed, but over a number of years the forums worked very well, and continued to work when Memrise shut them down.
Also, when Memrise decided to shut them down, that was the same time that Memrise told us they didn’t care about the web anymore, mobile was all that mattered, and around the time they got ride of most of their web development positions. Although the forums could have been very useful to users of the mobile app, Memrise refused to even link to them from the app so most mobile users didn’t know about the forums, meaning they were used almost exclusively by people who used the web site (although that includes some people who also used the mobile app). It seems pretty clear that Memrise shut down the forums as part of their abandonment of the platform and web site, not because of spam.
I note that nobody from Memrise has yet responded to this post:
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@ian_mn please promote my post that is specifically about that: Repair the community courses, 4: Course forums
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I think you have pinpointed the issue. It seems that very few people are on the forum. And I can only think of one issue that has been fixed since I started subscribing two years ago. (I can recall a few things breaking.) I wonder if Memrise is actually supporting their own product?
I recently moved from Android to IOS and find the IOS software to be almost unusable. It seems like someone should be able to copy Android’s functionality to IOS. Or I could keep my old phone for this one app.
Marta
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I don’t remember seeing any spam on the old forums at all.
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I think a possibility to avoid such spam would be to design the “report error”-button as an selection-menu (e.g. you can only choose between “audio is missing”, “translation error”, “wrong spelling” and so on; so there would be no possibility to write something ergo no possibility for spam – I have the Duolingo “report error” button as an example in mind) – that is an easy, low threshold way to involve the users in the improvement of the courses (and for other errors or bugs that need a detailed description the forum can be used) .
But I have to say that the memorize-support-service is generally not very good. For example I reported a bug (and I must say that it’s a major bug in my opinion: on the iPhone you can’t switch between courses and others seems to have the same problem) and the only answer (after a few days) was: We can’t fix it, try to uninstall an re-install the app… an other example: I wanted to report an error regarding my courses with German as source language and since I am a native German speaker and the App is sold for German as source language I posted in German into the forum. The answer was (quoted literally): “can you get your German (?) specialist to look into this to start with, please.” I mean: how on earth should I contact anyone if not via the forum and who the fuck is ‘my German specialist’ – I would like to have the number 
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I agree, there are way too many errors on both the official courses and especially in the user-created courses. There should be a simple and easy way to report an error that the course creators can see and fix. Also for the user-created courses there should be a simple way for users to review and report on the quality of a course so that others know which are the best courses to do. At the moment it just shows the most popular courses, but that means that more people try them whether they are good or bad, and you can stop doing a course because you notice a lot of spelling mistakes or other errors in the course, but you still participated and are one of the few thousand users who made that rubbish course popular. There should at least be a place so that new users can see reviews from previous users.
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Hi @Lisa_Eeyore28 - I agree with everything you just said. An additional aspect is that the first course created to support a specific exam syllabus usually ends up being the most popular, but is often riddled with errors and may have an author who is not contactable or has no interest in correcting errors.
An example would be for a learner who wants to use Memrise to learn German vocabulary for the Goethe B1 exam.
A search for “B1” gets you a long list of possible courses, but the one at the top of the page appears very usable (and even includes “official” in the title) but is chock full of serious errors that I’m guessing may have already caused some students to fail the Goethe B1 exam.
*https://app.memrise.com/course/1109151/complete-b1-vocabulary-list-official-list/
The course is popular (7.98k total subscribers, with 375 active so far this month), but the course creator did not respond to a recent request by a user to become a course contributor (sent via Memrise staff). As a result, the errors don’t get corrected.
Meanwhile, there’s a very similar (newer) course, listed further down the search page, that appears to contain no errors - I know because I’m an active contributor to this course. But it’s relatively unpopular (490 total subscribers, with 43 active this month).
*https://app.memrise.com/course/2041639/goethe-zertifikat-b1-wortliste/
Your suggestion for a place new users can see reviews from previous users would be extremely useful.
@memrisesupport, please could you consider arranging for a user review system to be introduced?
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How funny to hear the same comments - especially about selecting (and approving) great user-created courses, that were raised by many of us, many many years ago (and at regular intervals).
You are right that some great courses (or those currently supported) may never get a chance of being selected.
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I view this also as a sort of meta-signal: As long as Memrise staff ignore those four “Repair the community courses” posts I made, it’s very much a way of them giving the finger to the community courses and the community Memrise created in its first ~5 years. And that’s a clear signal that we should not invest more of our time and free labor in improving Memrise by creating or maintaining courses, at least not yet. Real, substantive, thoughtful answers to those four posts, would be the first real indication that Memrise cares about the community again, and that’s what I’m waiting for before considering coming back as a course maintainer.
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Yes, please. When I first started with the android application, it was only all too eager to request my feedback, creating a Zendesk ticket immediately. With that opportunity used up, now one has to tap and jump through lots of hoops and scroll though pages of conceivably helpful FAQ and suggestions in the attempt to discourage users from creating support tickets.
And I just dropped a subscription on this.