In what ways?
What are the major problems? I’ve noticed @cos’ “repair the community courses” series. Are they mentioned there? If not, could you tell me what they are?
I’m sorry. Since I’m new here, I’d always like to learn more about the issues.
There are just too many to list them all here.
In Feb 2019 (almost three years ago!) I started listing the bugs/problems that I found in the Android app. See for yourself how many still exist:
And that’s the Android app alone. As for my list, I got tired of working on it (and it was quite a bit of work!) with so little happening, so I pretty much stopped reporting new bugs.
Yes, there has been a whole lot I didn’t even care to mention anymore, some are pretty severe.
Here’s just one (again: Android): the app intermittently (I get this like once or twice a day across my session that covers around 20 or so courses, very reliably) starts a session in a completely different course than the chose one, also very often (but not always) mixing up my carefully constructed order of courses. Or the number of times you see an error message telling you that a course could not be loaded. Or the fact that, when you start a review session with 1 or 2 words, the app will load eons and then start a session with more than those two words. Bunches of others, sigh. Don’t want to think too much about them or I’ll end up getting too upset once again …
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just lol if that ends up happening. Nobody is going to make courses on Memworld.
- User created courses
- mems
- typing
Those are the three things you don’t touch, because that is where your most loyalty is and most hardcore supporters are. But you always end up messing with these three things. If you get rid of user created and or restrict my customization to them, I will end my subscription.
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I think they’ve made it quite clear that they’re not getting rid of user-created courses.
I’m an active member of the MEMRISE community. I’ve been learning since 2016 Hungarian.
First I learned with a community created course and afterwards I created my own special designed course. My wife is a native Hungarian and she supporter me in doing this (the right word at the right place, the right pronunciation and the right spelling).
Now I’m planning to rearrange this course and make the course public. I read all these upsetting comments and posts on the MEMRISE forum. I’ve fear to publish my course on the MEMRISE website, because I don’t know what will happen with the privet created courses in the future. I have all data on my computer (audios, mems, links etc.).
I have to decide to stay longer on the MEMRISE site or change the provider. I’m not kidding! Hier is one of my developed pages:
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It seems to be a lovely course that you’re creating. Please publish it, as it could possibly help thousands of Hungarian learners here on Memrise.
I’m not sure if this addresses your worries:
No, its not a special issue that worries me. I’s about the unsteadiness of MEMRICEs work.
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I agree with you on this, but it won’t do any harm publishing the course, will it? 
And despite the unsteadiness, I’m quite confident that community courses wouldn’t just be gone when we wake up some day (unless their server room explodes or something).
I’m quite confident that community courses wouldn’t just be gone when we wake up some day (unless their server room explodes or something).
@johnastsang
In the hope you are right I will publish my course within the next days. 
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Community courses will absolutely not disappear overnight. As we’ve stated we will be maintaining the current system in parallel with the old and nothing will be ready for public release of the new system for a few months. There will be extensive communication as we go on.
I’m aware it was a joke, but in case anyone was worried our server room also cannot explode because we use cloud based systems.
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The disappearance of community courses was not really the part I was overly concerned about (although the careful wording by Memrise that fails to solidify a real position on the future of them is suspect, It was the ability to add your own words and sentences outside the built-in dictionary list.
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What about mems? If you’re just leaving the current site in place there should be no reason to remove them then, right?
Seriously don’t see why “leaving the current site alone until the new site is actually ready” wasn’t considered the obvious option over “hacking apart the current site until it reaches the new state”. Pretty sure the former should be easier to manage and program too.
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I trust you, but I totally understand why people feel so insecure. I felt the same way until receiving the recently reassuring responses and more detailed explanations (mainly given in and after the Zoom meeting). I could never imagine I’d be so concerned about a website that I check out this forum every day (before December I wasn’t active here), because Memrise broke its promise to make mems available in Beta, with the completely unjustifiable reason that “few people use them”. Some people, especially those old loyal users who had been here for years voicing their opinions and experiencing how Memrise shifted its focus from providing a sharing platform to developing official content, lamented that Memrise might render community courses unusable or get rid of them altogether some day. I couldn’t help but believed that they had a reason.
Yes, this is what we’ve been longing for for years. I hope Memrise will remain responsive as they are in the recent days.
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Can you answer this question?
You are building a new website from scratch, but you have to remove a feature from the old platform. It’s not reasonable. Or am I missing something?
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That is the same question I asked 12 days ago, but it seems that they haven’t answered yet.
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We are not building a new website from scratch. That is a misunderstanding. We are evolving a new system from the old, and some features of the old system need to be removed in order for that to happen.
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Of course you don’t. But any company caring about their customers would simply make a copy of the original and work on that instead. Where’s the problem with that?
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It’s impossibly expensive to do that and wouldn’t serve any users well - we wouldn’t have the resources to support that kind of project and that wouldn’t work out for anyone.
It’s not correct to speak about “caring for our customers” as though our customer base is one group. We have different sets of customers, all of whom we care about and try to serve, but to do that we need to balance sometimes conflicting needs.
By far the largest group are the group that are served by the new system we are building. This group is largely not represented on this forum, because they are using the mobile product, Memrise-made courses and these forums don’t serve a particular use for them. However these forums do represent an important group - a group that are largely using our old product - and as I’ve said we are also keen to maintain functionality for this group wherever we can. We need to balance these needs.
The shift in approach that we are making now is that rather than prioritising making sure we don’t lose functionality for users of the old product while we build the new product (which means we move very slowly and anyway has not always been possible as I’m sure you will be quick to remind me), we are prioritising building for the larger group of users first. We will still try to avoid breaking things for the old users if we can do so without slowing down progress, as I’ve said many times, but our priority is to serve the largest part of our customer base as well as possible as fast as possible.
So this is not about “caring about customers” vs “not caring about customers”. This is about prioritising the needs of the majority of our customers more heavily than we have been vs the needs of a smaller group of customers who are using our old product.
It is a difficult choice, and one that we have not taken lightly. I also know it is not one that many people here are likely to like in the short term. However i do believe that because this is the route that will result in most financial strength for Memrise as a company, it is ultimately the route that serves users of the old product best as well - the more resources Memrise as a whole has, the more likely we are to be able to invest in products that serve smaller niche groups of users.
Ben Whately
Co-founder, Chief Strategy Officer
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So why did you close Decks down? Now you are doing more or less the same thing as with Decks, separating two groups of users, but also removing one of the features which no one knows when it will come back (if ever).
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How can they not use Memrise made courses? You removed user made courses from the phone app. Before you removed the user-made courses, I would see hundreds of new users join my course everyday.
Remote learning, stay at home schooling, increase use of computers for children and desktop e-learning and you (Memrise) have no marketing or effort put into anything on the website continue to go backwards in removing functionality. Smart phone market is heavily saturated and gimmicky language apps (yours included, because lets face it … you don’t really learn a language on a phone) are a dime and a dozen. I feel like you guys are missing a huge chance to invest and take part in a new emerging market. In fact, the old Memrise was actually mostly already set to harvest the benefit of the new emerging learning landscape.
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