We're hosting a community call on Friday 10th December at 4PM GMT

Welcome to the Forum! Memrise Announcements
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Hi everyone, @BenWhately will host a community call next Friday 10th December at 4pm GMT to answer your doubts and concerns about the recent announcements.

You can join by clicking on this link. Everyone is free to attend!

On the call he’ll talk through our intentions over the next year, and he’ll answer questions that you may have about mems or next steps with the Beta release. We’lI also set up a transcript of the call to share with anyone who is unable to attend the call itself.

See you then!

Best,
Ben and the Memrise team

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Based on what current Ben position in-short:
“Comment to be received, Decision to be unchanged, Mems to be deleted.”

Sorry I cannot attend the call, but please do not delete the Mems.

The user-created Mems help me a lot for my Japanese learning (now I am a N3). The beta and the mobile app which removed the Mems feautre is not working at all. The reason why people do not access the Mems is because it works and success to put them into the long term memory.

However in short term, the build-up is very important for your first impression and that library will also benefit to the overall community, especially for the new-starter learning. It is like how to ride a bicycle or how to use the chopsticks, will you always go back after you learn how to use it? You dont need, but the materials and the experience developed by ppls will always benefit the latecomer.

Also, while you want to introduce something new, it doesn’t equal you need to eliminate the old one. I strongly believe they can be exist at the same time as the beta stage is. I never take the point why the new system must replace the old one?! You can simply launch the Beta as Memrise 2.0 and keep the legacy alive, right?

I prefer Memrise against Anki is because the live community and the user-created mems. It is much more effeicent to learn a language with material and experience developed by the others. And that‘s why I paid for the subscription.

Last but not the least, I understanding what Ben need is a cash cow for the development teams, but Memrise is a user-based community. Deleting the community created content, especially for years of works and volunteeary contribution by the USERS, is far beyond what you should be.

If keeping the Mems is a problem in cost. You can increase the subscription price, launch a crowd-funding / public funding campaign, or transfer the library to a open source community. But not simply deleting those great materials created by the ppls quietly!!!

If Mems gone, Memrise is dead. That “Memrise” is a language course distribution platform only, not a mutual aid community anymore.

Many Thanks.

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Totally agreed.

An update for you: Ben has promised to bring back mems asap.

http://community.memrise.com/t/rollout-of-the-new-dashboard-and-learning-sessions-experiences-to-all-our-customers/69305/185?u=johnastsang

We are not going to delete them [the existing mems] from the database, and yes we’ll work a way to bring them back as soon as possible. I can’t give a timeline on that though, which is why this post initially said that we would just be removing them; the support team didn’t want to promise something that had an unknown timeline. I too cannot promise it nor give a timeline. But I can promise we won’t delete them and that I will be pushing hard to get them reintroduced as soon as we can.

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Be careful what you wish for. In my point of view, temporary remove user-created content without communication to the community is not acceptable. And no time schedule for the return? Sorry, it is not a promise.

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As a Memrise user I don’t see the slightest advantage of your new project.

  • You are disrupting Memrise features (mems, community courses, etc). If you want to use Memrise, but not Memworld features, this migration looks unnecessary.

  • Ben’s words about bringing features back are very vague, so some of them might never return. Let’s keep in mind that in the past there were things that never came back like multimedia files in community courses. At least, after expanding your developers will be busy as ever and it’ll take time.

  • What you are offering (video, podcasts, lessons) is not hard to find on other platforms, internet is full of them.

  • Websites dedicated specifically to one language are better than anything Memrise can offer, they are covering more subjects.

  • An option to make automatically generated wordlist seems to be limited by Memrise content, thus not appealing to those who want to make their own lists out of anything.

  • Promises about developing rare languages are amusing as we constantly hear how busy Memrise staff is. For instance, not so long ago it took about half a year to fix errors in one of the Italian courses, some translations are remain incorrect.

  • Everything Ben said so far sounds like propaganda with a goal to seduce Memrise users into Memworld. It’s understandable that you may want to build new audience around those who are already using your product, but the only thing I’d like to hear from Ben is that you’ll stop these changes and leave Memrise alone.

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What were they? We can still add images to the courses we create. Was there something more?

This reminds me of that we could add images to mems a few years ago, but not anymore.

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Indeed, while I have nothing against all the fancy innovations, I do hope that we could stop having to worry about losing anything that we currently have (esp. mems and user-generated courses)… Could Memrise please add new things while leaving old things alone?

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This morning while reviewing some vocab, I was struck by how much of it I almost missed until the Mem came to mind, and how many I knew I only knew in the first place because the images of Mems had been seared into my memory and were immediately and subconsciously summoned by my brain. I’ve been working on saving as many Mems as I can, but for a course like the Goethe B1 word list with thousands of words, I’ve only made it to the B’s, so that’s thousands of Mems I will never get to take advantage of or even see (let alone have a chance to download), and it’s pretty infuriating. Mostly because I already paid you to have access to them for the next 9 months. Meaning, that’s specifically what I paid you for. The fact that I have to rebuild all of this in Anki after–and I cannot stress this enough–ALREADY PAYING YOU for access to Mems is beyond insulting. Grifters.

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I’ve never seen them myself, because they are broken. :slight_smile:

Take a look at first levels in these courses, they contain multimedia files:

Here’s a description of the problem:

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I can’t join the call but I agree with everything Ray mentioned. I also use Memrise for kanji and I would gladly subscribe if it means I can keep the mems. I love this site as-is, and can see from the beta that the changes will simply ruin everything people value, it will kill Memrise.

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You can still add images to mems you make, though? I do it all the time

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The Mem function is going away entirely at the end of the year. They will just sort of…disappear. No more making or even using them.

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Before I carve time out from my extremely busy schedule for a call like this, I’d like a direct answer to the following question:

Is there any possibility that decisions which have been announced by the Memrise team may be reconsidered or is this simply a call to try to sell us on what has already been decided?

Thanks.

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So the problem is that multimedia levels are not available on mobile apps, right? I am aware of this problem. I didn’t get what you meant just because I’m so used to viewing multimedia levels with my computer, which seems to display them with no problems.

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Oh, yes, you can still upload images from your device. But a few years ago, there was a photo library which you could browse and from which you could select images for your mems. I used to make mems with that, but I don’t add images to my mems after the photo library ceased to exist.

BTW I’ve just taken a look at your mems. They are very interesting and funny. What a pity if you could no longer make mems after the turn of the year!

If you need help for saving your precious mems, you may find this helpful:
http://community.memrise.com/t/rollout-of-the-new-dashboard-and-learning-sessions-experiences-to-all-our-customers/69305/187

PS I’m also learning Japanese (without needing to memorise kanjis from scratch as I’m a native Cantonese speaker from Hong Kong :stuck_out_tongue:). Bon courage!

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Oh, I see, that’s a pity. I’ve only been here for 3 or 4 years so I didn’t know
And thanks haha… I didn’t notice I even had that many but I have over 500 apparently. No way I can save them one by one manually
Good luck to you as well!

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How do you access mems for a specific course like that?
I thought mems are only shown when you are learning new words, or failing them during the review. Both ways require a lot of redundant actions and are very cumbersome and unreliable. Is there a better alternative that I don’t know of?

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There’s a “preview” option for each level on the browser.

image
image991×408 34.5 KB

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Oh, I’m not able to download everything, just remarking that I’ll never even get a chance to see the Mems for the Goethe course because I’ve only made it to B alphabetically. I just save the Mems on items as I learn them or if they are ones I miss a lot. I don’t have any special tricks or anything, sorry. :frowning:

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