It’s becoming more and more evident that sometime in the next year or two, memrise will either shut down their web site and go mobile-only, or maybe keep the web site but officially deprecate the idea of user-created courses, and focus memrise entirely on memrise-managed language learning. Either way, we course creators and the courses we’ve created will be left in the dust.
Some of us have spent literally thousands of hours gradually building up rich, complex courses here over the years. When memrise does this, all of our work will be lost, and we’ll never be able to set it up somewhere else without recreating from scratch. Unless memrise provides a way to make local backups of your courses - which they will not. People have been asking for it for years, and they’ve never even bothered to comment on the idea. It’s not happening.
What we need is someone who knows how to write browser scripts and is skilled at it, to develop a backup solution for us, before memrise cuts off the web UI for course editing. How much time do we have? I don’t know. It could be just a few months, or it could be a couple of years. But I’m worried that it’s less than that.
We need a course backup option that’ll download everything. Multiple columns, column settings, all the alts, and the audio and video files, including which database rows each audio or video file is from.
Is there anyone here who has the skills and wants to work on that? Or several people, who might work together?
Having a backup plan for your memrise courses is definitely a good idea. Things have changed drastically from the beginning, when they offered download links for every course, not just our own, which gave us a CSV file for the course.
I think it’s likely that within a few years, memrise will either shut down completely, or more probably sell out to one of the bigger more successful language learning sites such as duolingo or rosetta stone.
Given that in their terms of service, course creators have granted them ownership over all of their courses, you could find your courses being offered for sale to others with no compensation to you, and you being forced to pay to use your own courses.
in the moment when memrise does indeed that - shut the web-version, chase away user content - they will become just yet another “gamified” app for MC learning on the phone…
how many of those you know? I’ve counted more than 50 apps only for Mandarin Chineses (apps with at least 500.000 users, audio, etc… - such apps are available in various languages in various parts of the Earth, not only English/USA/UK…)
who changed the name of this thread??? did you ever think about that some people who contributed to this thread might look for it (because of the many hints about various platforms)? this is called hijacking