This may be of interest to you, @Floria7 , given your own experiences there. I stumbled across a random piece of information in my news feed the other day and traced it back to here:
We are here to share that in March, the forums will be removed from … THAT place’s…website. This means all discussions and posts in our forums will no longer be accessible, except sentence discussions. This change is expected to take effect on March 22nd, 2022.
This is sad news for many staff and community members whose contributions over these years have created a safe and exciting space for language learners to connect with each other and share knowledge and stories. A number of cost-benefit considerations went into this decision. Although there will still be several channels and options to stay connected, unfortunately we don’t have a one-stop replacement for forums as they are today
Yes, sad, very sad. Considering that the signal to noise ratio over there is low enough to comfortably pass under an atom, I suspect that it won’t be a huge loss to the sum of human happiness and knowledge. But then, that’s true of their language courses which feature about 20 nouns, endlessly repeated like a linguistic Chinese water torture. The ant. The elephant. The whale. The penguin. And, of course… the owl.
I don’t even remember what the word for “owl” is in Italian. Of course, that’s by choice. If I ever need it I’ll just say l’uccello laggiù.
Ciao @LuciusVorenusX Yes, we had the feeling it would happen. A once excellent forum became, well, I won’t say it. However having been banned by ego-driven Mods in 2019 (the first day of Covid) for using the wrong pronoun and another 8 accounts for no reason, I am not feeling the pain currently suffered by many good people; I ventured beyond the owl’s nest and found a new home here. Many are clinging now to Duome which will eventually go the same way. It is not for me
Allora instead I spend my time with Life&Language forum and our own Italianduoclub, so together with Cloze I have three happy homes where I can learn with excellent people and not worry too much about pronouns! You should join us.
Meantime, you are most kind to think of me. I loved your l’uccello laggiù comment. Stammi bene eh!
Not a surprise, I agree. And a rationale occurred to me this week when they totally reorganized my German “tree” and even though I had finished the old one, it appears to put me back to about half-way through, while adding new material. Now, in the old days, there would be a rebellion on the discussion boards… but in the new world without those forums… Louis van Ahn has done what Vladimir Putin has done… and made it tough to carry out protests…
Esatto! That’s why it is always such a pleasure here to find that “Mike” stays in touch and even adds extra touches to an otherwise excellent course. I rarely visit “there” now having made friends elsewhere and made this my “home”.
[quote=“LuciusVorenusX, post:1, topic:24790”]
Yes, sad, very sad. Considering that the signal to noise ratio over there is low enough to comfortably pass under an atom, I suspect that it won’t be a huge loss to the sum of human happiness and knowledge.
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I won’t miss the forum, really; as you said, the useful content was hard to find.
I will miss the sentence discussion, though, I always thought that it was the most useful part of the courses.
Now that they are read only, they will become less and less relevant, and with no way to ask for clarification, I think Duolingo usefulness will deteriorate.
Fortunately, I am almost finished with Japanese, and I mostly moved over here, for my Japanese fix anyway.
I won’t miss the forum, really; as you said, the useful content was hard to find.
I will miss the sentence discussion, though, I always thought that it was the most useful part of the courses.
Huh, I could have sworn that they said that they were going to leave the sentence discussions open, but I just contaminated myself by going back there and you’re correct; sentences which (apparently) don’t already have a discussion will lack a “Discuss” link, and those that do have a discussion will show “This thread is locked”.
Mind you, at least it will stop a certain specific type of thread notification. That is, the ones in which SOME users feel that their post is sooooooo important, that to spend time reading answers to questions which have been answered at least a dozen times before is far, far beneath them. One of the worst examples was “I minuti diventano secondi”; the minutes become seconds. No matter how many posts there were RIGHT AT THE TOP pointing out that it can be either (a) a metaphor for time flying by, or (b) a countdown, some exceptionally gifted and important individual with the mental flexibility of a concrete wall just HAD to “correct” the sentence by saying “Um, well, in point of actual fact seconds become minutes”. It will also get rid of comments like “Yeah.” and “Hi!”.
Unfortunately you’re correct though; OCCASIONALLY there are some extremely useful comments by native speakers. The main problem is that you only ever stumble upon those by luck. It USED to be that you could see a user’s activity in the forums via their profiles, and you could browse through some of the comments by the better members and pick up some points along the way. However they killed that feature off years ago.
Yes, I was being slightly hyperbolic in saying that I didn’t know what the word was. After all, it sounds like “goof” which is at least one of the words that runs through my head every time I think about DopeyLingo’s sanctimonious management and its cutesy, intensely irritating “motivation” animations. (Which you can apparently turn off, but you have to keep going back to your profile because they turn themselves back on periodically. Living proof, as if it were needed, that DopeyLingo management is all about themselves and what they think the site should be, not about their users.) It’s one of the more printable words that come to mind, anyway.
Just a tiny note, one or two of those excellent madrelingua are in our well established club Italianduo.boards.net; an Italian Bookclub is also run in another forum. Let me know if u need more info.
