But with the sad caveat that while it works for the forum and most other purposes, it doesn’t work in course description fields…
Just to add to this discussion, here are a few link shortners to save the limited description space we have:
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This comment is not addressed to any user in particular, but to anyone who might know the answer. Bear in mind that I don’t fully know how all of this stuff works, so please forgive my ignorance with this postulation.
Instead of us going back and forth on this issue, why can’t Memrise just take the EXISTING link on the course description page (as seen on the website version as “Forum”) and rather than have it go to the current page on the course (that is going to be discontinued on June 30th), why can’t it be linked to the specific course creator page on the Community Forum (that we are responsible for creating). Is this doable ? (Isn’t that kind of like changing from one url to another ?)
To me, this would enable the user to continue to just click on the area that they already know (and they probably aren’t aware, or don’t care if the underlying forum area changes - they just want to post their comments somewhere). This also leaves the description field free of clutter that isn’t really relevant to the course anyway.
In essence, the user wouldn’t need to do anything new. The course creators would only need to create their forum pages (which many of us are already doing), and Memrise would need to create the links to those pages (they could make them clickable behind the scenes, so we don’t have to try to get creative on our own - or worry about potential viruses (@DW7) or hijacks or re-directs from outside sources that mean to do harm. This is after all a Memrise mandate, not a course creator mandate. Why can’t they do the leg work on their end, rather than us.
I don’t say this to be disrespectful, I’m just wondering if this is possible. Again, I don’t know how all of this stuff works, but to me it seems like a clean solution. Am I missing something ? (I know, probably a lot, but any thoughts ???)
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Thanks for your thoughts and comments @pdao.
I am no expert and we are left wondering what is the easiest and tidiest way to implement the change.
I have noted that rather than creating many (perhaps 150 in my case) individual “Course Forums” some creators have resorted to one for their all their courses (or all in a particular field). This to me is a much more manageable solution and I favour that.
Your idea Pdao is is a great suggestion - taken to it’s conclusion, wouldn’t it be good if
a) MemRise automatically created a Course Forum for every creator and
b) MemRise changed the destination of the existing “Forum” link to the appropriate Creator on this new area they are keen on us using.
The only problem left would be that Contributors are no longer informed, but I guess the Creator could include them by the “@” handle to any issue they would like the Contributor to consider.
Finally users will need to be informed to say which course they are reporting on (and ideally which level).
Dear @Joshua and @OliviaZavala, as @Pdao asks, is any of this slight amendment to your plan possible?
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你好 (Chinese for “hello”). Hope all is well with you . Thanks for the note. I don’t think point “a” is necessary. Course creators should take care of that (and it is already occurring as we both see each day). Point “b” is the important point. If Memrise changed the logic on the underlying url from an internal link (within the same page) to an external one (to the Community Forum page) that would be extremely helpful (and is really the key to all the other thoughts along this new path).
To carry this point out further, what if Memrise also gave a small additional line of space - say a fraction of an inch below the description field for courses that creators would fill in with the specific course url, then all Memrise would really need to do is point that url to the Community Forum page for the specific course which the course creator needed to create. (Logic would have to be in place to ensure that no typos occur in the urls, and that a Community Forum page was created so the url from the Memrise course would actually have somewhere to go (no 404 erorrs). Seems pretty easy peasy to me.
This is of course predicated also upon Memrise granting a small space of real estate for the course url. Remember when they said they might increase the description field area. Why not allocate that space in a separate, definable region that won’t be confused with the existing description information, and can ONLY hold url type data - nothing else, or it gets rejected at set up time ?
Finally, course contributors could add the url information in this newly created region for any courses they babysit for, since the goal is to point to a Community Forum page, not a specific @username page. (I know you have many courses you mother hen for, and I just acquired one a few days ago myself). I think this would take care of that issue as well.
Course users wouldn’t need to do anything different (and since not all of them are English-language based, or compute literate, the less they have to be aware of changes, the better). They need just continue to click on the “Forum” button - something they currently do. That button would just be re-directed to the Community Forum page for the course, rather than the existing course forum page, because of the url placed there by a course creator or contributor.
I am not a programmer. Just someone who chases after windmills and is looking for a solution to an issue that maybe doesn’t need to be as complicated as it is being broadcast. I doubt any of this will go anywhere, but even when I am chasing after windmills, I am an optimistic.
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the worse is, not all course creators got the email from @OliviaZavala. And I speak here about courses with more then 20 active users…
@Hydroptere ~ Greetings. Then Memrise either has to e-mail every course creator (they should know their e-mail addresses) or they have to have a fallback plan for course users who want to post messages about a course (after July 1st). Assuming a user could actually post something, how would they do it, and where would the message go (since there may not be an associated Community Forum page set up for a course) ? What kind of (error ?) message would a user receive if there is no place to send a message about a course. The devil is in the details, I guess…
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Also wondering how they are going to handle the myriad of courses created by the infamous “deleted…” usernames. There are so many of them. Who creates forum pages for these ?
@pdao: they did send the emails… but probably they did not reach every one of them… One of the creators of the best Bahasa Indonesia courses around did not have a clue about… and only today is not tomorrow 
btw, I curate a deleted for Mandarin: did post my link there too 
and I agree with everything: they make it almost impossible for the user to post typos, serious mistakes, synonyms, etcetcetc… how many tabs must one “poor user” keep open, to be able to signal some silly, annoying typo?
I don’t see that working as there is no uniform format to the forum threads here. Memrise is not going to manually link, as I don’t see an automatic way to do it, the hundreds or thousands of courses with the – not yet created – hundreds or thousands of topics here. Only way I see that working was if Memrise automatically created the thousands of threads, and that’s not a good solution.
Edit: it could add a field in the course details page: link to your course forum here, which course creators then could fill in. Then the “Forum,” or similar, link could link to that. Then the “Report” link could also be reinstated and link to that.
I originally misread your post and thought you meant to have the forum link to the course creator’s user page here, so users could message the course creator. That made more sense to me, but of course also has big drawbacks.
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@Arete_Hime ~ thanks for the message. I realize I was just kind of taking a shot in the dark,but I truly think this could have worked, IF Memrise would have created some kind of infrastructure FIRST, and then let course creators use that logic for their forum pages. Instead, the course creators began doing what they were told to do, and did it in a myriad of formats. Hence no uniformity, and little hope for standardization at this point.
I still think linking from the existing “Forum” button on the existing courses to a Forum course page on the Community Forum is doable. Maybe I don’t know all the how’s, but I am a user, not a Memrise programmer.
Basically I was just imagining Memrise only needing to do a few things: create space for the link on the course description page (that allows for url info ONLY which the course user would input); redirect the existing “Forum” button on each course to point to whatever the url was in the newly created space on the description page; and allow for logic where there are typos or no link (so a user gets some kind of message saying "okay already, stopping hitting the Forum button, it won’t go anywhere since there is no course creator for this course).
Again, I don’t expect this to happen, (I was kind of dreaming out loud) but I think it’s doable. At least in the parallel universe that I live in. But, I’m on to other things now, so I will let this fade into obscurity. Have a great day (or evening, as the case may be here in Taiwan) !
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I knew I shouldn’t have hit enter without re-reading what I wrote (a bad habit of mine) 
I think the existing logic for the external links are already in place. Creators were told to post them in the description field of their courses. Why can’t they just shift them out of there, into the newly created field for urls (assuming Memrise creates one). Then Memrise just use that info as the link data whenever a user hits the “Forum” button on a course. The url is simply the mechanism to get from point A (the course in question) to point B (the Community Forum - Course page). What that Course page looks like on the Community Forum is kind of irrelevant, unless I am missing something (which I probably am). Is something like this doable ?
I don’t know much about HTML or other programming languages (only dabbled in it a little to create a couple of blog sites) but I remember there being a difference between an internal and external link, and they seemed pretty simple to create. It seems the existing Forum button on the course pages is now an internal link (to wherever the courses reside on the Memrise server) while the Community Forum is probably located elsewhere and would be an external link (which the creator provides - Memrise doesn’t need to).
As for orphaned courses (without existing creators). If this logic works, heck, let Memrise know that I’ll volunteer to key in urls for them. I’ve got the spare time…
This horse has been beaten enough. I have thousands of words to refresh. Hasta…
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@pdao, this idea actually builds upon yours. I think this is still feasible. And I very much like this solution. What do you think @OliviaZavala?
回頭見！
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Dear @OliviaZavala (Cc @Joshua), since your email, you may have seen we have mulled this over extensively (74 posts) and have some concerns, yet we have tried to find the easiest and simplest solution that conforms to your new policy.
We are, as you know, respected long-standing Users, Creators, Contributors and Custodians/ Curators (of abandoned courses) so we know how courses work and we are always keen to see the courses (which MemRise so kindly publishes) as accurate and as clear as possible.
Personally I feel I have spent long enough commenting on and offering suggestions about this change and I think we all would really appreciate knowing if this dedicated field idea would be accepted and implemented.
(PS EDIT : I see this was my request in the second post!! but Olivia replied in the 14th post to say that was not planned.)
Secondly, I think I will wait to see if we can get a dedicated field or the extra space promised before I create and post any links.
As mentioned before, we are keen that the casual user finds it as easy as possible (perhaps not even noticing a change) to report any issues or even to ask for help.
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If I’m not mistaken, even with more space, URLs in description won’t transform into clickable links to the page they are supposed to lead to. That’s not really a problem since most users probably know how to copy/paste a link to another tab, but that still leads to accessing the course forum being a bit less user-friendly…
I don’t know if I missed that, but maybe you or another contributor to this thread know(s) the answer: is there any reason for not creating a specific field? The only reason I can see would be to avoid having a “forum” link actually leading somewhere else entirely, but this problem doesn’t disappear when the link is in the description (we can just put more non-related links inside the description field). I’m not complaining about having more space in the description field: this is great. I’m just trying to understand the logic behind the solution that we were given.
Another solution would be for course creators to use a multimedia lesson as lesson 1 to provide all the important information, including the link to the forum and to the other parts, for multi-parts courses. This is not a really good solution, but I guess this bypasses at least the lack of space in the description field for now and the fact that descriptions won’t allow for real URLs (but most people don’t even bother reading these, and even worse, they don’t even appear on the Android app).
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@DW7 thank you for all your efforts with these discussions (and everyone else)
I too am in “wait and see” mode, we have the entire month of June to see what happens.
I thumbs up 
the idea about en extra field and automatic link if provided.
Am also curious as to how Memrise will treat this issue for their own courses or those “maintained” by Memrise Admin, with users as curators.
Cheers
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Erfahrungsbericht/résumé of field report… (grummeln grummeln)
the current mess: the team deletes the report link from the learning/review pages - claiming they will introduce a much better solution later. Then the old forums disappear, and a bit later we are annnouced the deletion of the “natural” - attached to the course - course forums. Afterwards the team keeps silent. Probably they ran to buy popcorn; now they enjoy the flick: “users racking their brains” on imax screens. It should be rated R, the least, this flick.
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How do inform the whole user base that one should keep the tab/link to the forum open, while one is planting/watering?
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The app users do not see the course description - without a separate field somewhere for the forum link, no reports whatever from app users.
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Web: many users prefer “water all”/review all items in a category - in such watering process they never have the opportunity to report anything,
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after all these forums and links deletions only the learning phase seems indeed ‘appropriate’ for reporting. A bit … stingy from memrise, so to say. This somehow implies a learner who is familiar with all items already, if s/he is able to spot all mistakes in the very learning phase… such learner does not really need memrise… Or?
… It is already very complicated…
Btw: Users could identify the mistakes in Ben’s courses (the HSKs) only after they reached higher levels of competence in Mandarin - i.e. they finished higher-level courses, among others. Only afterwards they reported the mistakes, in the course forums (not that Ben ever answered, some users asked for the curator rights/burden) You don’t believe that such users would restart more basic courses (in this case Hsk 1, 2,3, 4)? These users could report the many mistakes because the reviewing page provided the “report” link. Now, that link is gone!
and now … what?
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Thank you @Hydroptere for your helpful résumé - it does read as a sad tale.
I would add two other changes and that was :
i) the loss of “auto_grow” for courses where we are not a creator.
I have learned on courses where I think I know the subject fairly well but want to refresh or refine my knowledge.
To avoid endless repetitions, I went straight to “auto_grow” and completed the level, then just watered it as often as I was prompted. That way I could still report any issues with entries as they arose.
I take a pride in courses being accurate and as helpful as possible to one and all.
When the wording changed to “auto_learn” only course creators were allowed to do that, so that’s why I support so many semi-abandoned courses.
ii) PS EDIT - we also lost the ability of creating Mems with images immediately, which IMHO was what MemRise was all about.
Secondly - thanks for your information about the app, which I did not know had so many limitations, so unless MemRise informs users by email or with a clear message at the start of a session, then they will not know how to report an issue.
The trouble may be that the app is their main aim and as these features are not present, they are not seen as important for courses for users like us on the web.
Thirdly - thanks for the information about the problem of watering by subject. The same is true about watering by course as I find it important to know which level the issue is in. (I water by level now because large courses crashed when I started watering by course.)
I fear users will get frustrated with courses where they find issues and are not able to comment on easily, and faith in MemRise may diminish.
Without people reporting issues, we can’t improve courses - whether our own or other people’s.
(Oh dear, and I said I was going to “wait and see”.)
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as for me, I can do with a learning/reviewing UI/page as it was in 2013, lean and slim… take out the gimmicks and crackers and replace them with an “report” link. I assume taking out the sun/sky from the dashboard would free some tiny bit of capacity. One “end session”, instead of two, would also free some capacity.
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I agree, it will be interesting to see how MemRise handle their own courses - so far I don’t think they haven’t set any links up.
And @Hydroptere makes a good point that as one progresses and then goes back to review a ‘lower’ course, one might find a mistake at that stage.
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