Well, I made my course forum thread now. I just put it in the Japanese category despite that it’s for all my courses (including Faroese, Greenlandic etc), because my Japanese ones are the most popular. Then I put a link to the thread in my user profile and in a multimedia level at the beginning of my most popular course. Instead of listing all the courses I’ve made, I felt too lazy and just linked to the general “courses made” page.
A thought I had — a lot of people don’t trust shortened URLs because they’re afraid of viruses, so I put the full link and just erased the https:// part along with the numbers after the thread title, to save a little more space.
@risgrynsgrot ~ 我喜歡它, 謝謝！ Brilliant concept and design. I think I am going to use this approach as well. Best one I have seen so far. Thank you for sharing.
nah, @DW, that forum is only for Eingeweihten, the (carefully selected) intiated - and no, I don’t really want an “invitation”… The initiated can bother further about whatever, personally I’ll stop bothering about this feedback issue. Memrise team’s business.
You don’t “scatter the threads through the forum”, you put them all in one category to make it easy for someone to see a list of all the topics in that category. Each one has its own subject line.
If someone reports a problem, the subject line of that problem report is prominent, and if you click on that subject line, you see the problem report, and any replies to that problem report only. You do not see loads of unrelated comments about different things. And the course maintainer can leave a comment there saying how they fixed it, which everyone who looks at that problem report can then see.
In other words, exactly like we’ve been doing it with course forums all along, except better because we’d also have the search feature.
All along, every course has had its own forum (which is like a category here), and each post there is separate and has its own comment thread. Each discussion is kept separate and generally on topic.
What memrise is proposing here is like if each course had, instead of its own forum, just a single long comment thread. THAT IS HORRIBLE AND COMPLETELY UNTENABLE.
So, instead, what will happen is this: Most courses will not use one single comment thread on a single post (aka “topic”) forever. It will get too unwieldy. Instead, people will make separate posts about the same course, so that they can keep different discussions separate. I most certainly will.
What’s the result? Exactly the thing some people here are afraid of: lots of posts scattered “all around the forum” about the same course. Well, scattered all around a particular category. Like, we’ll have lots of posts about Finnish courses in the Finnish category, and lost of posts about French courses in the French category, and so on. But there won’t be any standard easy way to find all of the posts about one particular course.
How to solve that? Either give each course its own category, or make course forums separate from this site altogether.
You ignored my posts and repeated yourself. I invite you to read them again.
You’re advocating treating the forum as if every course has it’s own category. But it doesn’t, so that’s not going to work.
If you had said: I suggest every course has its own forum category, then we can post a separate topic for every issue in that course’s category, I would have perhaps agreed, if it was implemented nicely – i.e. if a different forum was created for that (but that seems impossible as well, as users can’t create categories, and Memrise doesn’t have the time to create them).
If I understand your suggestion correctly then for any specific course, instead of us making a general “[Course Forum]” thread (as suggested above and posting it on the increased course description area) we post a link to a category (eg French language courses) and ask people to prefix it with say “[Course Forum] ‘Paris French’ by @XYZ Level #” and ask them to make sure our @ ID is used so we get notified.
Some people (and perhaps me too) are saying they will not even make one thread per specific course but one for a whole suite of courses (hence an even greater chance of confused postings).
Whichever system is used by people, one of the things I have asked @OliviaZavala (in that other thread you and @pdao were asking about) was to have a sub-category of say the French language that was just for Course Issues (rather than flooding the said French area).
###Can I draw your attention to a new thread I have started?
Having decided to start creating these new Course Feedback forum threads, I have a series of questions about where to place the “[Course forum]” threads, but I didn’t want to clutter this rather long discussion thread and anyway it’s more to do with the practicality of it.
I have also sought MemRise’s thoughts on the issue:
###I have updated that new thread to show how I followed the advice given here, to create threads covering subjects, and placed them in the appropriate heading group.
(I am sure slow to reply) Yes, I am unsure if there is an option for doing this. That said it could be helpful in organizing course threads that start to get complex.
Of course, all this might be a moot point if users can’t or don’t readily access the forums here to begin with.
You have over 50,000 points so it shouldn’t be a problem?
The reason for this is that our course forums were being littered with spam from bots.
Our new community forum has spam filters and very alert community leaders, so there’s no minimum score required. Anyone can post threads and reply to posts!
(apart from spam bots of course!)
Thank you, @Lien. I think not needing the 50,000 and improving the filters is great . I use Memrise to teach my students so I don’t use it for learning myself, but I had to get 50,000 points to be able to post messages in my courses.
There has been no modifications to an individual courses home page to make it easier for creators to advertise links to the new course forums.
No extra space in the course description, or even better (IMO) an area to place a link to the new forum.
So if I want to provide my learners with a way to contact me I have to go through all my courses and reduce my character count in every course description to provide some information about how to get to my course’s forum. What a waste of my time.
(just as well I don’t have many learners and pretty accurate courses!!)
I agree @leggi, and I have said we are still waiting for the extra space.
I am hopping that @OliviaZavala and the team can set up this extra space (in the description field) soon, so we can do our last task of advertising the new Forums.
. I use Memrise to teach my students so I don’t use it for learning myself, but I had to get 50,000 points to be able to post messages in my courses. 