SR intervals are NOT reset for wrong answers (red, yellow) when over-watering (grey review button) course items (empty backlog)

Memrise Bug Control Web Bugs
1

Hello @MemriseSupport

I tested over-watering for the Portuguese BR course from MartinPen: https://www.memrise.com/course/359836/duolingo-brazilian-portuguese/

Whenever I click on the grey review button for over-watering my taken course with an empty review backlog queue, all spaced repetition (SR) intervals are NOT reset on:

  • typing errors (red)
  • typing errors / warning (yellow, almost correct)

I had @cooljingle 's user script “All typing” and “Auto correct” active, as I usually do when I do the normal review (blue button) of words in my course backlog.
And they just work for the normal (blue) review quite fine!!

Examples (numbers/levels have been checked AFTER the review was finished, not before):

wedding, yellow: in 6 days
to answer (phone), red: in 27 days
holiday, yellow: in 141 days
to build, red: in 88 days
property, yellow: in 138 days

Why does the code not at least reset the SR interval back to 4-12h when I incorrectly answer an over-watered word?

Over-watering:

Honestly?
I definitely have to do it from time to time, and I would probably NOT do it for PT Basic, PT1-7 with all their contained phrases/sentences…would take me endlessly to over-review those with typing instead of multiple-choice.

My own tests have shown, that I do forget some words for my single Portuguese PT BR DuoLingo from MartinPen, even the next watering interval may be set to 30 or 60 days or longer.

I seem to forget some words much earlier than the next (standard Memrise) SR interval.
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Well, this is the drawback you get when you build a system, with fixed spaced repetitions, zero user customization, but were the code doesn’t fine-tune to the error count and maybe marked difficulty answer-level by a user (e.g question buttons like “How well did you knew this word from 1-5”?) :frowning:

Can any long-term Memrise developer look into the code what is going on and why there are reset differences between normal (blue) and over (grey) reviewing items, please?

2

I agree that the team really isn’t paying enough time to the algorithm and questions about it considering it really is a huge part of the site’s value.

Personally though, if it was actually confirmed that over-watering doesn’t affect the algorithm, (positively or negatively), I would use it more as simple practice, though then again, I hesitate to even review in a notebook my recently learned words so that i’m quizzed in the standard review right when i’m supposedly about to forget.

So for you, you would prefer the overwatering to affect things as in a normal review. How do you feel though about words you review that were still some days, weeks or months away from being scheduled for review? When responding correctly, for instance, would you want the algorithm to push back the quiz date even further (though you hadn’t waited the normally full word wait time)? Wouldn’t that lead to, hypothetically, being able to learn a new word today and with 5 or 6 overwaters being able to push it back months until you see it again?

This is the kind of thing I think the company should be working towards if they were really into the learning science side of things still, such as solving how to have games and exposure to learned words but not having that “cheat” your memory, at least in early stages of memory retention.

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