Many thanks @BenWhately for setting up this meeting.
I’m sorry but I will not be able to attend due to other commitments, but I am sure you will be giving us a resume afterwards sometime.
Also I know you have seen and read the many comments we’ve all made in various threads recently (and in the past), so I sure you know our views and concerns.
PS
Bottom line, as long as our created and supported courses continue in a format we like, and Mems are available, I shall be pleased.
Okay we will definitely listen
As a reminder, please respond to these questions:
Thank you, @BenWhately, though I still have some concerns and I’ll need to see how things work out, the meeting was very constructive. Good luck with the new project. Please remain responsive to the community.
@BenWhately, one major point that I forgot to mention in the meeting: How will Memworld deal with ancient/classical languages, like Latin, Sanskrit, and Ancient Greek, which cannot be learnt through immersion, watching films, having conversations, etc.?
In the same way as all other courses that can’t be moved to the new system: they’ll be kept on the old system.
As we discussed, once the old system is separated, it will be much less expensive for us to keep our running in parallel - the big cosy of the old system is how much it slows development of the new system. So it seems likely that we can keep the old system running until we find a solution that works for everyone.
OK, that makes sense. Thank you.
This brings us to one of the questions that I asked here but did not get response. I intentionally didn’t bring it to the meeting because it’s relatively unimportant and the time was barely enough for the crucial issues. But as we’re speaking, please allow me repeat myself:
We may not understand the technicalities involved here, but could anyone in the Memrise team at least try to explain why mems need to be taken down so that the desired changes could happen? Particularly, I understand that the big changes are happening on a separate, in-progress website known as “Memworld”, so why is it necessary to disturb what we have here?
Thanks again for your time.
I have your word on that!
It’s extremely important to me. 
I’ve been on here since August, and in that time I’ve apparently made over 500 Mems. That’s not to mention all the brilliant ones other people made that were effective enough that I didn’t even need to make my own.
Oh man, now I’m getting mad again.
great, fantastic, supercalifragilisticexpialidolcebitch whatever
leave the classical version as it is now, take down “temporarily” the mems, go on with the memworld, and let the users chose the version they want to use
given the more in-depth nature of the vocab some of us are learning, or given the fact that adults do not learn through immersion, just kiddies until…12? the current classical version is …fine. Learning is a process which in adults requires determination, skill, time, money (having spare time, etc), a supporting environment etc. These are not insignificant factors. Constantly disturbing them is no joy, no joy at all. As one user duly noted: am I “driven mad by a darn website…” or something similar
@BenWhately, while you haven’t responded to my latest reply (no hurry - I understand that you may want to take some rest), I have a new question for you, suggested by @Eltaurus through private communication:
You mentioned that you will not be allowing transferring “incorrect” word pairs to the new platform. How well you machine learning algorithm will be detecting those remains to be seen, but a lot of translations aside from plain dictionary definitions may rely on some level of context, outside of which they might seem inaccurate. If this is not processed with enough trust to what was done by course creators, the migration might leave a lot of UGCs in a broken state. How would you deal with this?
Thank you very much.
So… Did anything come of this? Did they address any of people’s issues?
i still don’t get it
which is the conclusion of that famed meeting CEO Memrise - User base? where is the transcript?
users complain, memrise does … what
Hi @PollyWalnuts, I’m wondering which Goethe B1 course are you learning from?
I know of two possibilities:
One that’s described as “official” (and contains a ton of errors).
And another by Schwarzerberg that’s very accurate. (I’m a contributor to this one, so I may be somewhat biased).
I would encourage use of the Schwarzerberg course, to avoid learning errors.
Well, that’s good! I’m using this one:
Excellent choice 
If you spot any errors, please let me know either by starting a thread under community German courses or by just sending me a personal message through this forum. I’ll fix any issues.
I don’t know if @BenWhately has posted a transcript yet, he said he would, but I can summarize broadly what I think we learned:
Memrise was on the verge of running out of money and shutting down entirely about 7 years ago. They had already determined that their community course platform (which I will call “classic memrise”) was not going to grow enough to support the company, so they decided to save the company with a new “curated” language-learning version of their app, focusing on Mermrise-created courses for the most popular languages.
Yes, this was a big change from what they had built until that point. They intended to keep both of these going in parallel, the classic memrise platform and the new mobile-only language-learning thing. As many of you here know, they did a pretty poor job of this, both in the implementation and in communicating with existing users about what they were doing. The kept breaking stuff on the old platform, at unexpected times, often without warning, while at the same time making changes they presented as improvements (such as changes to the user interface) and telling us they were continuing to support and improve the platform even though their own courses were higher priority. The reality seems to be that they had already decided classic memrise was never going to work, but wanted to keep it alive alongside their newer stuff, and maybe they didn’t even realize how badly they were messing it up and breaking it in the process.
They did, however, attract a much larger number of new users for their new popular language mobile courses, and they did save the company. Which means they saved the (degraded) classic memrise along with it.
[ Along the way, they also say they found that making user-created courses visible in course search on the mobile app caused users’ average time on the app to decrease. It seems that Memrise equates average time spent on the app per session, with language learning effectiveness, though they did not justify this claim and I am very skeptical of it. However, if you accept that assertion, then it follows that they fond that making user-created courses visible, decreased language learning effectiveness. Based on this, they hid user-created courses from the app, and they say this led to users spending more time on the app. Therefore, they do not ever plan to un-hide them. ]
More recently, they made another big decision on a change of direction: Having one codebase supporting both classic memrise and their new popular language learning app is not working. It has been slowing down their development, and preventing them from creating the features they think they need for the users of the new memrise, and they think the company could still fail unless they start moving a lot faster. Apparently they’ve been struggling with it for the entire time, trying to make it work, and they’ve decided it just can’t. So, they need to separate the two completely, and that’s what they’re working on now.
What this means, according to them, is that they’re creating a brand new platform that’s not based on the same data structures and features as the one we’re using new, and they will move their mobile apps to that new platform, and with it, most of their users. However, the old servers can remain, running classic memrise, indefinitely, so they don’t have to make any big decisions about its future now. They say that the main problem they’ve had supporting classic memrise is that since it shares the same code base as their popular-language mobile courses, it makes it much much harder for them to work on. When the two are separate, keeping classic memrise’s servers running won’t be expensive for them, and they intend to just keep them running.
Also, because they do thing Memrise the company is not on stable footing right now and desperately needs new features quickly to get more users and get enough money to support them, they’re going to do this separation step as fast as they can. They say this is a reason why they need to disrupt some existing features, which they aim to bring back later. This part of the talk was pretty vague, and Ben kept it vague despite a few questions, so don’t ask me for details :).
Some other things this seems to mean:
After the separation, classic memrise may be much more stable than it has been since ~2015. A lot of the changes they made, and the bugs they introduced, were because of the work they needed to do for their new stuff. When the two are separate, they won’t need to change classic memrise to support development on their new system.
This also opens up the possibility of reversing some of the changes they made to classic memrise, if they’re simple. Reversing those changes won’t affect their new system, so they’ll be more open to doing it.
But, they’re also not going to want to spend developer time on classic memrise. At least in the near future. Or ever? This isn’t clear. So, maybe they’ll be open to making very easy changes, after the separation is done. Or maybe, only after they decide Memrise is on solid ground and financially stable. Or maybe never, who knows.
They also talked about “moving” courses from classic memrise to the new platform, but this isn’t straightforward. First of all, the new platform is for languages only, so non-language courses can’t be copied over. Secondly, in the new platform there will be one shared database for each language, not separate databases for each “course”. This is going back to the original “wiki” concept they had for classic memrise, that they moved away from around 2012.
On the new system, users will be able to make “word lists” which are similar to “courses” in classic, and share them. They were somewhat vague about what form this will make, in part because it sounds like they’re still designing it, but it did lead to some misunderstandings. A “word list” seems like it will be a collection of sets of items (like “levels” now) from the shared database, along with notes, videos, and other bits in between, similar to what we can sort of do with “multimedia levels” in classic memrise. So, migrating an existing course would seem to involve first copying all of the items from its course database into the shared database, merging whichever items match ones that are already there, vetting them all for correctness, and then creating a “word list” that matches the levels in the course.
They said they would do this for “active” courses, and for courses that someone asks to have migrated. Which means they will not do this automatically, or try to do it for all courses, but any course you care about that is a language course should be able to migrate. However, of course, the new system may not match all of the features we’re used to, so some courses may have content that cannot be migrated. We didn’t get a chance to talk about how they might handle things like synonyms, alternate answers that we create extra columns for (to have memrise say “you entered the ___ and we want the ___ instead”), alternatives, commas, etc. They do intend to include images and audio and video, but it may be handled differently and may not work for the courses we have now.
In response to some of my questions, Ben also indicated that:
I would only say there have been a couple of instances where maybe a tiny bit of specificity would help to distinguish one word from another. I’ll keep my eye out for them. Thank you!
Thank you @cos, for a detailed and informative summary.
It would be nice if @BenWhately liked or endorsed your summary.
I wonder if curators will be able to modify their migrated courses?
Without giving it much thought, I think I’d prefer all my curated courses to remain on the Classic (not official relaunched App) and I think this would be better for MemRise.
I would like the App to draw attention to our courses (as has been suggested after completing Level 7).
And I would love it if we returned to the planting theme and landscape.
Thanks Cos, and apologies for slowness in posting the transcript. I’ve been down with COVID. I’ll get the transcript shared asap.
One note on the above: right now Memrise is in a solid financial position - back in 2014 things were tight, but now we are fine. What I intended to say was that if we didn’t make a change now, then in a couple of years time we would be back in a difficult place, and that is not something I am prepared to risk.