Any phrase with commas or hyphens is marked yellow when answered correctly, then green when reviewed - but the session does not progress from there.
This is on the web version (German: 5000 words sorted by frequency), and has been going on since Yesterday.
On a more personal note:
Your users are really invested in their learning routines, and your website’s very basic premise caters to just that. Spaced repetitions, high scores and all.
For a user, coming back, sitting down, starting a session - just to discover it’s not yet working - that’s an enormously frustrating experience, and it doesn’t have to be this way. It would be so helpful if you could communicate regularly to the users that you are aware of a problem, and working towards a solution. I love Memrise, but this dynamic can really wear the most avid user out…
I have the same issue. At one point I copy-pasted the answer, and it would still get marked yellow. When I then type it correctly, it turns green but the ‘Next’ button disappears. I have to delete what I typed for it to re-appear, and move on without saving the changes. It’s very frustrating at the moment.
This bug only applies to words that have non-alphanumeric characters such as , - ".
The memrise team should frame this and put it on their office wall.
This is the #1 mistake any company with customers can make, and it’s amazing how many do this. Communication is key, nothing is more frustrating than not even knowing whether you were heard or not.
@Joshua passive-aggressive frustrated-sounding response just reinforces the impression that Memrise does not dedicate staff time to user communication in any serious manner, leaving it to developers who think their job is to do other things (like work on code) to peek in here after the fact, after long threads of frustrated users have been going for a while, only to make a quick off-the-cuff comment so they can get back to their real work. It’s probably not @Joshua’s fault, and he’s probably a nice person trying to do his best, but Memrise has created a bad situation for everyone with their egregious long-term mismanagement.
Note that we’ve been talking about this very thing since 2014 at least. I’ve been using memrise since 2012 but fall 2014 was when things started to go downhill and people started pleading with memrise to communicate more. Despite many comments about it on the old forum, and my high-voted suggestion on the uservoice board asking memrise to communicate their plans with us, they never addressed the issue in any systematic way. They only occasionally apologized after the fact for some big communications failures, only to do the very same thing again and again, so their apologies ring hollow now.
Another missed opportunity was when this new forum was created, and a group of us urged them to make a memrise announcements category and use it to post updates about what’s happening at memrise and what feature changes are coming and what bugs they know of and so on. It took some really persistent urging by users here before memrise created that category here… but then they never bothered to actually use it to keep people up to date, so it was a wasted effort.
It has been years. Memrise does not care about communicating with users. We just need to learn that and move on, I think.
cos, really, you’d get nicer/better/comprehensive answers if you’d not throw around with pseudo-psychological / moral judgements… don’t get upset, but can’t you forbear “passive-aggressive” somethings? You do know I agree with many of your points and I do respect your opinions otherwise
(psychoanalysis is still fashionable only in some corners of the country you’re living in, funny those corners see themselves as progressive or something…)
EDIT: some awake user (a “she” I think) mentioned “customer rights” - maybe that is a concept
They’re pretty shocking at communication - despite promising updates on twitter (the first place I looked when the review problem came up last week), there actually STILL hasn’t been a tweet saying it’s back working again so I’m glad I’m not relying on that.
I’ve never actually seen a tech start-up so terrible at communicating with people. Most companies like this are really natural at engaging with their users. Christ even like my bus company or the gas company would tweet you back and they have people whining at them all day every day…
You can gain a lot of goodwill be being open with users and realistic about timescale when you have problems. It’s ok to give updates even if nothing has changed!
I had a problem with my review this morning, I received a reply from the developer here that they were looking into it. No-one posted again but I’ve discovered this evening that the problem was silently fixed. Why not say something and take a bit of credit for sorting it out?!
The title of this post was changed. Joshua’s reply makes perfect sense with the original title.
On the new topic, Memrise has been okay about using this new forum to interact with its users about bugs (Joshua et al) and course issues (Lien and the various “language specialists”). So this new forum and the better functionality it has, and how Memrise staff uses it, have been a definitive improvement, or it has at least made the communication that always must have been going on more visible.
Where it still is as (was?) atrocious as ever is about communicating about bigger things than individual bugs or courses. For an outsider that is very difficult to understand. Maybe it has data showing that its communications don’t get read? Or maybe it has decided its strategy is no one’s business? Or maybe it has decided it just doesn’t have any resources to devote to try to solve the issue?
If I were Memrise I would break the thing down: what news do we have and what do we want to share?
Memrise strategy: back off, you’re not the boss of me.
Small bugs and course issues: got that covered with the forums.
Larger issues that affect courses and course creation: regularly updated FAQs would be nice, referenced on the course editing and creation pages and the forums. A changelog would be nice. (even if only updated when something big changes once or twice a year).
You have various tools on the forums for these things, like wikis for the FAQs and a locked and bannered or stickied topic in the announcements category for a changelog (and linked discussion topic).
Membus: got that covered on the blog, shame it doesn’t get referenced much though.
Just my opinion, this doesn’t have to do anything with Memrise. If I was running my company, for every release, I would had to be careful to see whether it solves all the problems, not just one. If I publicly say it is fixed for a problem, then I have to make sure it solve all the cases. Otherwise, it will be confusing for everyone, even for us.
I find that fewer and fewer companies appreciate the value of regularly communicating with their customers/users. Even “bad” news seems more palatable to me if the communication is proactive. I wondered if I was the only who found that.
It’s interesting to me that I am seeing this push for communication on both Memrise and Duolingo at this time. Both sites are well loved in the language learning communities. Language learners valuing communication? Now who would have expected that
On the other thread, they have stated they will work on that. I see no reason not to give them a couple of weeks to add a few updates to the Announcement page and see how it goes from there.
Memrise is not communicating with customers/users at all.
I sent my request about 3 times now and still now answer or comment on it.
I’m really disappointed. Wanted to use memrise in the school to help students to learn propper mandarin, but the mobile app is throwing me blank slate instead of choices/or mixed choices from different database columns when prompted with audio. Its really frustrating that after several months there was no change in the way the app acts on mobile devices.
