That’s the wrong link. This one is better: http://community.memrise.com/tags/course-forum (if you know the category the course is in, it’s quicker to go to that category and then look for the [Course Forum] topics in that).
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Thanks for the tip - that works really well! And I agree it’s best to look in the Category.
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This discussion, to which I have added, is quite relevant.
We really have a problem now in not being able to contact Creators or Contributors who haven’t appeared on this Forum yet.
It would be really helpful if either PMs worked, even if they haven’t found this area yet, or if we could invite them, somehow - perhaps by contacting @OliviaZavala or @Joshua
Any help would really be appreciated.
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It appears that the “Forum” button on each course has now been removed; at least I can’t find it anymore.
As it stands now, we have lost the old course-specific forums and also lost the less useful link to the new community forums home page.
So for the vast majority of courses, whose creators have not created [Course Forum] threads in these new forums, there is no way for learners to provide feedback to course creators.
This is supposed to be an improvement?
You are right!!!
The only link is the faint grey general “Forum” link at the bottom of each page that doesn’t seem (to a user) to be relevant to any specific course.
If we only had the extra space, we could at least advertise our new “[Course Forums]”.
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For me, in the continuing absence of the “promised” extra space in our Course Description" areas, it became a simple matter of what was most important. I chose to temporarily replace some of the non-essential course description to make room to include the url of my new course forum. Ever the optimist, I saved a copy of the text I removed, of course, for later re-insertion when we are given the “promised” extra space!
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I agree that the extra space, though not ideal, would help a little, but a dedicated field to allow the course creator to create a clickable link to a forum of their choice would be better.
I don’t understand why these destructive changes have been pushed through in the first place. Course creators are the life blood of Memrise. They create the product that Memrise is trying to sell. They have already given very generously of their time and energy to create and maintain their courses, so why make them jump through even more hoops just to maintain contact with their learners? And even if they do jump through all of these new hoops, the end result will still be inferior to the course-specific forums that we used to have.
These recent changes defy rational explanation.
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Speaking as a course creator and maintainer, the removal of a forum for each course that was directly connected to each course was a big mistake. Expecting course creators/maintainers to compensate for this error in judgement by the memrise team was a big mistake.
I can no longer maintain the courses that I have been involved with in the past.
Having course forums directly connected to the courses was the place to have them. The new system is idiocy and smacks of being a “bright idea” from someone trying to justify their own existence.
Big own goal memrise, well done!
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Hi @DW7,
Sorry about the hold up. No, I’m not a contributor to that specific course. I’ve noticed that the creator of the course has indeed created a course forum and linked it in the course description, which is good!
I think the initial problem might’ve been the time it took (or is taking) for the course creators to realise and react to the switch. You all seem very involved in listening to the community and troubleshooting. Keep up the good work!
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“Current World Leaders”. I messed up by not replying your post up-stream. It doesn’t matter though as it’s all good now.
Cheers.
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So pleased you now have a way to communicate with the creator over that course.
I’m left with not knowing what to do about some other courses where they are not in this area, so I can’t even send them a PM. So I think I’ll have to offer to become a Contributor.
Automating the forum creation and a link to the course on the course page whenever someone creates a public course would, of course, be ideal. In the absence of that or until then, an option might be to try contacting a few users on the top of the all-time ranking lists for the course and ask if they would consider becoming contributors if the initial creator can’t be contacted.
I’m not sure if this is practical or works within your terms and conditions or whatever, but it might save you some time. Just my two cents.
Oh, and a “flag” button or something on the course page so that users can at least report (in an orderly fashion from your perspective) the absence of a course forum might streamline the troubleshooting some.
Another problem is that the Discourse forum software that Memrise is now using is a terrible design to use for course-specific discussions, because it uses a flat chronological display of posts in each topic, instead of showing replies directly beneath the post that they belong to. This design makes it extremely difficult to follow which posts in a topic are new thoughts, and which posts are replies to earlier posts.
For example, if someone posts right after me, but in reply to the very first post in this topic, their post will appear after mine, and it will not be obvious at first glance that they are responding to a much earlier post. Only if a user happens to see and click on the light gray curved right arrow pointing to another user’s name will they have the chance to see the original post to which the reply belongs.
Another confusing aspect of this design is that instead of reply posts appearing just once directly below the post they belong to, they will appear in 2 places which is very confusing: First in the chronological stream of posts, and then again farther up the list of posts under the post to which it replies, but only when you click the light gray (X Replies) drop-down arrow.
This flat chronological display of posts that Discourse uses is a very controversial design, and very different from the way that most forums display posts, and I don’t think that it will work as a replacement for the course-specific forums at all.
This topic is a perfect example of the usability nightmare. We only have 152 posts in this topic, but it is already impossible to follow the various sub-discussions that are taking place here.
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I think this is another example of Memrise using user data for the 99% of people who join memrise and leave after a month instead of the 1% of us who stick around.
People join, make a course, never use the forum, leave memrise. And these forums were a waste of time. But what about the rest of us?Just like organizing the mems into different categories was a waste of time for people who were not serious about learning but was very important to the rest of us before we lost it.
Now the Course Forums, which are so important to make sure mistakes get corrected (and every course has mistakes) are gone. People are supposed to copy and paste very long and messy URLs to a forum that looks like it’s from the 90s and is almost as slow as if it were. Oh well! It’s free, I can’t complain.
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@RabbitWho. I’ve stopped contributing since they got rid of the course forums. I had been contributing to a number of courses, including a couple of quite popular ones, but I no longer have any idea what state those courses are in.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking memrise is free. Some people pay for the premium service. The trouble is, memrise depends on community contributions for the quality of their product content and then they go and alienate course contributors by getting rid of course forums. They’ve made it much more difficult for the community to contribute but they don’t seem to realise it. How long before they realise the quality of their product content is suffering, I wonder.
What a shame.
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I’m very much against this change. I went looking for the forum to a popular course and couldn’t find one. Who knows if one exists - it may be buried but a search didn’t yield a match.
I’ve PM’ed you.