Where did my mems go?

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6

I’ve been looking further at the official Spanish courses I’m doing.

In Spanish (Spain) 1, I can see mems for two items in Level 3 (“nada” and “la suerte” - not mems that I created or chose), one in Level 5 (“llevo” - my own mem) and one in Level 12 (“la racción” - my own mem). Nothing else.

In Spanish (Spain) 3, 4. and 5, I can see a single mem for each item throughout the course - they are not ones that I have chosen. I couldn’t find an entry with more than one mem showing.

In Spanish (Spain) 6, I can only see mems for two items in Level 1 (“gritar” and “Perdonar” - both are my own mems). Haven’t looked any further in that course.

Let’s hope we hear from the support team guys soon. I hope it’s only a bug and not a (misguided) intentional change. Without mems, they’ll have to rename the site “Rise” !!! :roll_eyes: I also hope they are able to recover Pilar’s mems for her!

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Does any of this apply to user-created courses?

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I have checked a couple of community courses I’m doing and saw a lot of mems there. By all appearances, thus far it affects official courses only.

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Hi, DW7, thank you for the welcome note! :slight_smile:

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My mems were all created on user-created courses, as far as I remember. I created mems for Spanish, Norwegian and Portuguese courses, at least.

Why would they remove mems from the public view? That’s an awful idea!!! :disappointed:

As far as your mem for " una habitación individual", I couldn’t see it. It said it was “mempty” (a funny word, mempty).

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11

Most likely your disappeared mems is a technical bug or something of that kind. Let’s wait and see what Memrise guys will say.

As for mems in general this is a thread from three years ago. I think mems is an annoying nuisance for them because you need to moderate them, they take a lot of space in storage, etc.

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12

There are two issues here which may or may not be linked.

The complete disappearance of Pilar’s mems may be an isolated glitch, which they can recover for her. I do hope so. I have had a random look at the profile pages of several other users and didn’t find any that had suffered a similar loss. So, fingers crossed.on that one.

Regarding the loss (or reduction) of mems from ‘official’ courses, it would be really helpful to know if this has occured as an unitended consequence of the recently announced coding changes, or an unanounced planned change (similar to the ill-fated one in the April 2017 Release Note linked in the post above which was later overturned).

Hopefully, when the Memrise team return to work tomorrow, we’ll hear something from them about both issues.

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13

This never really occured to me - I’m currently working on resp. repeating 13 official courses and I never see Mems. Maybe simply due to the fact that they are present in community created courses, so I’d endorse the assumption that they’re generally gone in official courses.

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I’ve now read through that 27 Apr 2017 Release Note. Josua’s post which closed the topic led me to this later Release Note from 4 May 2017 which seems to explain the different treatment of mems in community created courses and those in ‘official’ courses.

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So different policies were applied, specifically mems for official course have been hidden since then?

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I’ll have a look into where @Pilar_Pereira’s mems went, as that seems like a bug, but let me shed some light on the mem issues over the years…

We had a fair bit of grief with the moderation of mems a few years back (there were A LOT of really inappropriate mems being posted), which meant that the quickest way of resolving it was to hide mems to a degree, and to reduce the visibility of your mems to other users on mobile platforms (web wasn’t changed). It wasn’t the best solution, but it was the quickest we had at the time, as it was blocking us from a big featuring on the app stores. This was coupled with the fact that we did a research project and found that folks weren’t engaging with them particularly well. We did the change, and put it in the ‘let’s deal with this later’ bucket. Over the last few years they’ve become less visible as we’ve worked on other stuff, which is why you don’t have many mems for the official courses (as they’ve been created in the last couple of years).

What I will say is that there are people within the company who are quite vocal and passionate about the impact of mnemonic devices on learning, so we want to work the concept of mems back in. I can only speak for web (which is the area I work in), but it’s something that we 100% have on the roadmap for the new release, it’s just a sizeable chunk of work, so we’re going to release without them first and then bring them back in soon after.

So yeah, believe me, mems are still talked about inside the company. They aren’t a primary focus, but they aren’t disappearing completely afaik.

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Hi Luke,

Thanks for the reply:

Thanks. Hope you can rescue them all!

I think the web version was affected by the initial April 2017 change. Maybe it was the subsequent reversal of the change for community created courses only which introduced differences between the web and app versions? Reduced access to mems still exists in ‘official’ courses today.

Good to know!

Thank you!

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@lurkmoophy I felt hopeful when I read your comment, but 15 days later my mems are still gone… :sob:

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I remember when Memrise told us that you looked into mem use and found that users weren’t “engaging with them” much. This “research”, though, happened after mobile had already been launched without showing mobile users any mems at all. It happened after the user interface on web (where you could use mems) hid all mems by default, unless you knew to click a subtle link or button of some sort that you could easily never notice unless someone told you about it.

Even users who did use mems knew that by then, mems were kind of a secret that most Memrise users would never come across, so many of us had stopped treating them as the shared platform they used to be, and were mainly creating mems for our personal use. I may have been one of the holdouts, still trying hard to make popular mems that would help other people, but it was a somewhat bitter experience doing so and knowing they would really only help people I personally talked to and showed how to find them.

When I made my courses, making mems for the things in my courses was part of it. I considered those mems part of the course. When mems got more and more hidden, including from all new web users (unless they found the obscure way to enable them in the web UI), that’s one of the things that discouraged working on and expanding courses.

If Memrise ever decides again that being a community platform is worth anything, then among the many other changes you should make, you should throw out that pointless and misleading old research, and support & emphasize mems for real.

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Hi! All my mems are stil MIA. :sob:

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21

Ten months after my first complaint my mems are still missing. I really regret this. I haven’t been using Memrise with my students, although I have in the past created courses for them because I don’t trust Memrise anymore. When I began using Memrise, in 2012, I soon became a huge fan and I was enthusiastic about using and sharing Memrise. I even helped people learning my native language (European Portuguese) and recorded my voice in some courses, just to make other people’s experience as good as mine. I was really an active member. When Memrise began organising the Tour to record audio and video of locals, I made a contribution. I chose a sentence that was meant to appear I don’t recall where. I volunteered to participate when the MemBus came to Lisbon. I never got a chance to participate because I wasn’t told they were getting here. I felt cheated and I think that was when I got a little away. (Also, I had my fourth child.) All this but I still remembered how engaging Memrise could be. The lost of my mems is the tip of the iceberg because I feel no one (from the Memrise team) really cares. Maybe I’ll recreate my most popular mem just to never see the “You haven’t created any mems yet. Oh, no!”. Or maybe I should just close my account. I know I wouldn’t be missed because I haven’t been around anyway.

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Hello, again!
I did recreate my most popular mem and now my profile says I’ve created 1 mem. Now I can be sure my other 270 mems are lost forever…

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@lurkmoophy, @MemriseSupport would you guys be so kind and make a statement RE user-created Mems? Many people put quite some time into them so I do think this is an important resp. serious issue. Not to mention Mems on official Memrise courses …

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Hi @Pilar_Pereira, sorry about the delay in following up on this.

After further investigation, I’m sorry to say that it looks like your mems have been deleted some time around your first post in April 2020. Let me explain a bit more why this happened:

Here at Memrise we have a system that detects suspicious profiles, based on inappropriate/spammy content posted in mems, usernames, and - in the past - profile bios.

We first found out that this was happening in 2017-2018, when we had to implement this system to keep the Memrise website safe for all our customers. Unfortunately this is still happening every now and then.

Why does this happen?

As I said, in 2017-2018, we discovered that a number of Memrise users had used the same email address/username and password for their Memrise account and other web services. One or more of these third-party services had suffered a security breach at some point in the past, which allowed someone to access the affected Memrise accounts fraudulently using the same details.

The affected accounts may have been used to post inappropriate content (such as spam) on our platform, for instance by editing the username or creating inappropriate mems. It sounds like this is what happened in your case.

Once this happens and we detect a suspicious profile, we take appropriate actions to make the account safe again - usually this includes resetting the username if necessary, lock down the profile and force a password reset, and unfortunately removing all mems from that user.

We looked for your email address on a public list of breached services (https://haveibeenpwned.com/) and we can indeed see that your email address and password were exposed in several data breaches, which backs my hypothesis that this is what happened.

(Please note that there has been no security breach on the Memrise account itself.)

I’m really sorry to say that your mems can’t be retrieved as they’ve been deleted forever. I’ve already raised this issue to our team, asking them to implement a better way to do this - however unfortunately I have no timeframe for this.

Please rest assured that this won’t happen again.

If you want to discuss this further, please contact us directly via https://memri.se/support > Submit a request at the top > Data & Privacy requests.

@Olaf.Rabbachin - Unfortunately I can’t comment further on mems in general at this time.

Best,
A.

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@ale_c Thank you for your reply.

As far as I could understand, the security problems happened with users who used “the same email address/username and password for their Memrise account and other web services”. Though it’s true I have used the same email address and sometimes username in different web services, the same isn’t true for the passwords. I always use different passwords and my Memrise password had and has nothing to do with any other passwords I’ve used.

Anyway, when this happened, why wasn’t I contacted? It would have been nice to know what was happening and also what was going to happen to my account.

Still, what you’ve said explains why, at some point (probably when these problems happened and you reset my account) I received a message (I don’t remember if it was an email or not) welcoming me to Memrise. I was very surprised because I had been using Memrise for some years (as I mentioned in my previous comment in this topic) and it didn’t make any sense. NOW it makes sense…

Anyway, what is lost, is lost. Life goes on.

Best regards,
Pilar Pereira

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