@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. 
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I have deleted this post as it could be confusing, so the following two posts are no longer relevant.
Suffice it to say, we all are doing what we can to resolve some issues regarding the changes to Course Forums.
@DW7 - Hope all is well. When I try to access the link you provided I get this message: “Sorry, you don’t have access to that topic!”…
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.
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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.
Can you say more? Who is “we” in this case, and what are we/you doing?
We are all of us who have thought about this issue and posted in this and other Forum threads.
What are we doing? Making constructive comments and posting suggestions to MemRise and to each-other.
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).
Hi Cos
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).
Which is in line with what @Arete_Hime is saying:
How to solve that? Either give each course its own category, or make course forums separate from this site altogether.
I guess we are all sad to see the current system - which has worked so well - go.
###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.
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Will I still need 50,000 points in order to post in a course forum? Even though I am the creator of one course?
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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!)
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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. 
###I think this thread could be ‘closed’ (but kept for reference).
ie no more posts are needed, as we have had a fruitful discussion and I am grateful for the advice given by all of you.
####NB the link to the “Where to create (ie place) the new [Course Forum] links”, now documents (in the first post), what I have done.
//community.memrise.com/t/site-feedback-where-to-create-ie-place-the-new-course-forum-links/1303
(I’ve suppressed showing it on purpose)
Yet!
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!!)
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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.
@leggi and @DW7 - I just went through the whole space allocation change in the description field of all my courses this morning, and it took a couple of hours for around 20 courses (most public, and a few still private that I haven’t finished yet). I did so for 3 reasons:
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I think it is too late in the game for Memrise to grant any extra space in the description field. If they are still operating on a July 1st deadline, then if they were sincere in granting extra space, they would have done so by now. The change is less than a week away, and still not a peep from them, so I think that speaks for itself on this issue.
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As course creators, we should think of our “customers” first. They are learners (users), not Memrise. So we should do what we can to aid in their learning process, even if means scattering some extra language in a very small descriptive field. If what we add aids the learners when/if they need to contact us, then that is great, and we have done our “job” successfully.
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I believe (and others may dispute me on this) that learners will want to try (and potentially stay with) a course based on its content, not on the few words we put in a descriptive field before they actually begin to use it. Yes, what we put in the descriptive field may entice them to give a course a whirl, but if their is little substance in what we offer, they will quickly abandon it, so why worry about what we write (no matter how much space we are given). We should focus more on what is inside the course, not on what is outside of it. If that makes sense.
So, while the exercise is a bit tedious, and like so many others, I too wish there would have a better or more aestethic way to handle the new information, it is crucial that we get it out, and get it out in a respectful way for our “customers”. After all, if we didn’t expect any learners, we probably would have kept our courses private.
I tried to go one step further, and I added a multimedia field up front in each of my courses, kind of directing learners what to do if they need to contact me (which I doubt anyone ever will, because like @leggi I have created pretty accurate courses ! ).
I think the piece that is really still missing in this whole exercise is letting learners know that they can’t just click on the pseudo-link information we are asked to put in the descriptive field. Not everyone who uses Memrise for learning is computer literate, computer intuitive, or even of the same native language as us course creators. So I hope somehow Memrise will take some extra steps to educate the public on this. This I feel is their area, not ours. The learners, at that point, are their “customers”, not ours.
So take the time and go through the exercise to add the additional text. Yes, it is not ideal, but think of the higher purpose in what you doing. You are not decreasing descriptive text, you are increasing customer service. Who knows, maybe the responses you might receive in the future from learners on your courses may be truly wonderful and positive (rather than just asking you to fix something) and that would make it a win-win. Just my two cents on this issue…
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I have also posted in all the current course forum threads (on the courses I’m supporting), to inform those users of the change and where to find ‘me’ in future, giving them a link. (As that information is currently sent to their email address )