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.
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…
@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 …
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.
@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
Hi Pilar,
We do email affected customers to give them steps to regain access to their account when we lock them out for safety purposes. It sounds like this was it.
I’m sorry to hear this wasn’t clear enough. We always collect feedback on our processes so this will greatly help us improve how we do things.
Best,
A.
Ok, Alessio, thank you for your time!
Best regards,
Pilar
I don’t see anything yet to replace the mems. So this means that it’s about some guy wanting to improve the profit margin (even further). No matter that there are paying users, and bandwidth isn’t that expensive. You could at least have kept the mems until there’s a replacement. This is obviously a cheap business move.
İ want mems back for user created courses, they were so useful