Hope Covid isn’t too severe for you @BenWhately, get well soon.
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If there are going to be two distinct sites then anyone who is on courses not language based would have then to work from the two sites if the language ones were migrated. That would be quite tedious especially if the two sites worked differently. Even if UGCs remained on the old version you might be using memrise’s new courses so it would still mean two sites.
I would worry that if the old site was sold the courses could be changed dramatically. I tried quizlet for example but didn’t get on with it very well so would be quite disappointed if that happened.
I wonder what the proportion of paid members is now. If memrise is in good nick is it because of them or the advertising. Is there going to be a difference between the old and new site in whether you have to pay or not.
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Oh boy, that’s pretty much the worst transcript that I’ve seen in a long time - sadly, the sound quality isn’t very good, plus the text transcript is next to unreadable, persons were mixed up, etc.
So you’d really have to listen through the whole thing (1,5h).
Would anybody who participated care to summarize the call …?
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Isn’t that exactly what I did, just before they posted the transcript? 
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Here’s my brief summary of the call. Feel free to correct.
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Memrise struggled financially before the official courses era has begun (before 2014-2015). Now there’s no such problem, but they have to grow and develop further to be stable. Introduction of the official courses was a difficult time for Memrise staff because users were against changes.
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The classic Memrise website has been impeding the development for years. Now they are taking a risk and building a new platform. It will have all the fancy features described in the other thread. They have to remove mems from the old website to go forward. Nothing is decided about mems’ comeback.
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After everything is ready on the Memworld website they’ll start to transfer community courses there. It’s planned to do it automatically, but not every course will migrate, like non-language courses. What to do with them Memrise team will decide later. Community courses are to stay on Memrise for a while, there’s no plans to remove them (*not clear if we can chose where our courses will stay). It’s not difficult to keep them in their current state.
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Dictionary databases on Memworld should help users to build high-quality courses out of movies, podcasts, etc. (*not clear if it would be possible to add words which are not in the databases)
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Memrise team decided to hide community courses because users were not staying long in the app after interaction with them. They are not planning to hide community courses on Memworld.
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Instead of levels on Memworld will be scenarios. If you are a teacher you can write a scenario, a sequence of courses to learn.
One of the most interesting parts of the call
We’re in a much better place. And I mean, let’s creatively explore what we can do that like Steve says, We are more than happy to open source that code base like to work out how we can spin that off to someone let them work. We did talk with Quizlet about doing this. It turned out to be a bit complex to do but at the time and didn’t quite suit either of our businesses. But we were totally open to that. And yeah, no reason not do that.
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The more I read about this, the more I ask myself why you, Memrise would risk breaking everything (including functionality in your official courses, yes that’s what has already happened!) and perform open heart surgery on your productive system instead of developing the new solution in parallel and switching things over when you’re ready.
And, sorry if I have to be a bit brusque again, but if finances aren’t the problem, how can it be that there are just so many countless errors in your official courses that haven’t been fixed in years, even though you have constantly been notified by your users about them.
Why is it that every update bears a very high risk that something no longer works, or a feature gets removed without prior notice (probably without you guys even realizing it!).
Why does it - best case - take extremely long until you fix a problem that you have actually confirmed? Actually, most of all problems never seem to get fixed …
I’d sure like a reply to that. Maybe you could shed some lights on this so we at least understand, @BenWhately?
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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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