For some courses I see them and for some, I don’t.
So are they gone or not?
If someone can explain to me the situation.
On official courses, you can only see your own mems (or the mem that you’ve previously selected). On non-official courses, you can see everyone’s mems.
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But that is not entirely correct also.
I remember that in Japanese 1 there were memes, which I used, and it’s an official course.
Has it been a while since you went through the course? The changes were put into effect around the end of April, I believe.
I haven’t taken any of the official courses, so I’m just going by hearsay, but it seems that it works the same way for the official courses now that it did for all courses for about a week. (until they changed it to that compromise after a lot of users got upset)
That would mean that you cannot see or select any mems created by other users, unless they’ve been approved by the Memrise staff. (I don’t know whether or not they’re actually going to take the time to do that) Any mems that you’d selected prior to the changes would still display as your chosen mem, but if you were to select ‘choose another mem’, it would disappear, and you’d be unable to select it again.
That’s how it worked when I was testing it on non-official courses during that week, at least. I just had a look at the first level of the official Japanese 1 course, and there wasn’t a single mem to be seen. Considering that 363k users have taken it, I’m sure mems have been created for at least some of those words; they just aren’t being shown.
I didn’t quite understand this sentence.
Did you mean the community created courses were being affected too by this?
If only the Memrise courses are with this restriction that is not such a big issue for you guys, right?
I’ve checked again on my phone and I can see all the memes in Japanese (there’re plenty).
There’s also no issue in switching between memes while retaining them.
I’ve checked the same also on the web and in an Android VM (with a newer version), and there was none of them anymore, as you said.
I assume the difference is because I use a bit of an old version on my phone. I didn’t update it.
I think I started the Japanese course somewhere in May.
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mems, not memes
you like to spend lots of time in the forum, I see. Do you school vacations already in your country?
Are you referring to me? I’m not a spring chicken anymore.
I’ve read this press release previously, but since I continued seeing memes everywhere I was confused.
How do you figure? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme
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Interesting. I guess the mems still show up on older versions of the app. I often wish I could rollback to an earlier version of the website too. lol
Yes, that’s right. They initially intended for it to affect all courses, but there was a very negative reaction on the forums to the change, so they changed it to only affecting the official ones. It isn’t a big issue for me personally now, no, though I still think it was a very unfortunate decision to hide them for such popular courses. My sister does take the official French courses, and she hasn’t been happy with the change. I wouldn’t be either.
I’m using version 2.9_3900. You can find it by google searching.
This version is the one with the old flower graphic.
I also found memes for Russian and German.
Before Japanese, I didn’t really use them all that much, but I’m getting to see how they can be quite powerful. They allowed me to learn the Kanas like it was nothing. I was really impressed with their effectiveness.
I also wanted to know if there is some database sharing of memes between courses going on?
Or do you always need to create them again from scratch?
Can you easily import memes from other courses?
If I see a course with memes, and I also find another course but with what seems to be much fewer memes, I guess I should pick the first one as it will have a big advantage over the latter, right?
Doesn’t that essentially mean, as a rule of thumb, I should usually pick a course by its popularity, since a large number of participants will most likely ensure a big database and quality memes?
Thanks for the info. I appreciate it. 
I usually use the website rather than the app, but I’ll keep that in mind if I find myself using the app.
I agree on the effectiveness of the mems. I’d had a few failed attempts at learning the kana before I joined Memrise, then I learned all of them within a week or two of only spending a little bit of time each day. I’ve been using them less for vocab lately, but for certain things they really are essential for me. I would not have wanted to learn all of the jouyou kanji without mems. lol
On database sharing, you used to be able to import words from the universal wikis. This would import all mems made on other courses for that item, and also add any new ones that were made on your course to the other courses. I used to make this a high priority in my course creation, but it was unfortunately removed around the same time as the other changes to mems. Now any new items that are created will have zero mems initially, and any mems that are made for those items will remain only in that course. Definitely another very unfortunate downgrade to the system, in my opinion.
Your other question is probably a matter of preference. I certainly wouldn’t consider the number of mems to be the only criteria in which course to pick. I’d want to be confident that the course is at least mostly accurate and well-formatted, and it’s a big plus for me to see that it’s still being actively maintained, too. I personally prefer the format of the beginner Japanese courses that I took when I started over the official ones, for example. If I were just starting out on a topic though, I would probably look into the most popular courses first, and work my way down until I found something that I liked.
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I was mostly speaking if all other things being equal, as there are usually quite a few similar looking courses, and this would end to be the main difference or selling point.
For ex. I was having quite a bit of an issue deciding which of these courses should I pick:
https://www.memrise.com/user/ArabicFrequencyGroup/courses/teaching/
The 5000 course is much more popular, but I don’t really favor the idea of doing it as one humongous chunk. There needs to be some division. With the 2 others, he did only the first 2000 and there are a lot fewer users which will result in a lot fewer memes (maintenance will also probably take a hit).
It seems like I have no good options here, but to pick the 5000 course for the aforementioned reasons.
Thanks for all the info that you shared.
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I guess it is just the nature of these online learning platforms. Very few people reach higher levels of learning on here , so heavy users would have to spend a disproportionate amount of their time contributing to the creation of mems if they wanted to use them. But then most of the time even if they do exist you may have 1 or 2 possible mems to choose from, and they may not even resonate with you. Hell - I make my own courses now and I encounter a lot of top 20,000 words in Chinese (but non-HSK words) and almost 90% aren’t even in the Memrise database, let alone would have mems if I could even find the course the mem belonged to. So - you end up just making a mem yourself, or learning based on context (if reading/listening).
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In the context of the official courses…
In addition to your own Mems, you will see Mems that have been curated by Memrise staff. If you already have another Mem selected before the change (not curated or your own), then you will still see it. However, if you deselect it, you will not be able to see it again, and you will not be able to re-select it.
For community created courses… You will see all Mems, as before.