That implies they will be deleted, and gone for good. From what Memrise told us recently, that is not the case. Mems will not be erased, but will be made inaccessible for some period of time. Eventually, they want to make them accessible again, but they don’t know how long that will take.
As far as I know, nobody from Memrise has explained exactly why they can’t leave Mems accessible, but @BenWhately said this is related to the process of separating the classic Memrise platform from the new Memrise they’re building. He indicated that there is some problem that makes it really hard for them to keep Mems accessible while they implement this separation. Yes, that is vague, I don’t know any more than that, so take that as you will. It still sucks, but it’s not the same as what your message suggests.
Maybe I’m more cynical, it’s just been my experience with websites (ex: goodreads, facebook, spotify) that when a feature is “temporarily” removed, it is removed in the hopes that people will eventually forget because short attention spans, and it does not come back later, which was the whole idea. However, I do hope you’re right!
Good to hear that the plan is that mems will come back!
My initial question isn’t answered yet though: is anything going to happen to other aspect of memrise with the update? Will all other functionalities continue to work as they currently do?
Ah sorry I misread your post, you will still be able to access other people’s mems on their profile if you happen to know which user you want to look for, but I appreciate that isn’t of much practical use
@James_g_memrise has given clearer responses regarding the future of community courses on Reddit. I’ll paste them here for everyone’s reference:
Question:
Is memrise getting rid of custom courses?
After the update on December 31st, will I still be able to learn with my private coures? I’ve compiled a Hungarian course with 11k plus words, plus I have some for Croatian, French, German, Portuguese, etc.
I would hate to lose these. They are literally years of work (since 2014). Will I still be able to learn with these? Will my experience be more or less unchanged?
Responses:
No memrise is not getting rid of custom courses.
If you are learning or editing a course then it is active. There are millions of courses that no one has edited or had a lesson on in literal years, those are what we would count as inactive. You do not need to worry or waste your time moving them elsewhere.
We are not getting rid of community courses in the way you are implying. I’m sorry if anything you’ve read on the forum or heard in Ben’s talk gave you that impression. We will be able to keep community courses running side by side with the new developments for a long time, but we may not be able to dedicate any resources to improve them, but you don’t have a high opinion of improvements we make so maybe that’s a blessing for you. The new learning platform will still let users make courses for their own and public use but will let creators have access to Memrise’s high quality audio and video content (to be clear you’ll still be able to add words which we don’t have audio and video content for). But it will also be easier to make courses from other things such as videos and articles. Of course we’d like users and people to migrate to the new platform when it’s built because we believe it will offer everyone a better experience, and we will make that as easy as possible by copying existing courses. But we wouldn’t deprecate the current community courses until the vast majority of users are on the new platform, if we can’t convince people to move then it would be a good sign the platform isn’t doing it’s job well enough. Furthermore, we’re still at the ideation stage and experimenting with various concepts on the current Memworld site, we’re months away from anything happening.
Good question. The android app is now full of ads. The free version is impossible to use. I am interested only in community courses. So my question is: they will be always available in the android app? The community courses for me are the only reason to buy a subscription.
Yes you can still use community courses on the website and apps. Absolutely nothing is happening to them for months at least, and we plan to let people use the current courses ongoing even when we have the new platform built which is still months away.
So you can update your app without worry.
I’m not sure ‘impossible to use’ is fair, there’s a 5 second advert every second learning session. The volume was too loud originally but we have since dropped the volume by two-thirds. We wish we could show fewer ads or use different formats but unfortunately each individual advert makes so little money that we can’t reduce this further and still offer an extensive free experience to users.
But to answer your question, they will be available in exactly the same way on Android for the foreseeable future (by our current plan considerably longer than 9 months)
I think then you have a very good reason to buy a subscription. Judging from your experience points, the community courses must have helped you a lot. By paying a small subscription fee, you can go ad-free and support the company that is hosting the courses.
I have private courses that I only use sporadically. If I want them moved over to the new system do I need to just hold a review session once for them to be considered active again? And when would I need to do this? This month? Or later?
You do NOT need to move courses to the new platform to be able to continue using them here. So if I were you I would wait until the new Memrise platform is launched and usable, check it out, and see if you’d like to migrate your course there and if it seems to fit. In the meantime, just keep on using it on the web on the existing site.
While they did leave open the possibility of someday shutting down the old platform, that a) may never happen and b) is likely to be years away if it does happen. So you can wait and see the new platform before you decide whether you want to move to it.
johnastsang and cos have provided excellent answers to this already and thank you to them, but I wanted to reiterate you don’t need to do anything (apart from continue to enjoy your courses)
We are months away from the new system being widely available and the current system will still be there after that. As we have a more solid plan and get closer to things being ready for you all to use we will communicate this widely.
