What Updates Have Been Done & What's Coming?

Clozemaster News and Updates
#13

Hi Mike,

Thanks for sharing this and I can understand the reasons for capping the number of times a Cloze word is repeated. If I may, I would like to add a few thoughts to this …

  • My chosen target language is Polish. As you may have seen, I’ve spent many an hour adding numerous sentence notes on the app to help my learning process, as well as hopefully help other users. When purging the sentence database, would it be possible to exclude sentences that have a sentence note ‘attached’ to them?
  • As well as learning the Cloze words in a sentence, I also try to learn any new words (to me) in the sentence as well. If numerous sentences were purged, I’d be concerned about losing touch with associated vocabulary that I’d learnt as a byproduct of a Cloze that had been repeated numerous times. Does every word which appears in any sentence on CM then appear as the Cloze word in another sentence? If so, then this would not be an issue.
  • Connected to my last point, a word may sometimes repeated but it might have a different meaning or nuance in another context, or when used as part of a set phrase, or idiom. A wholesale purge might lose the ‘richness’ and complexity of the target language’s database offering on CM. This may not be a problem for a beginner but it could be for any intermediate or advanced user.

I’m not sure what the best solution would be. The app currently allows the user to exclude sentences themselves and to choose the fast track version if they wish, which cuts out the ‘fat’ of the whole available database, if they so wish. Maybe it is better to allow the user to customise the database themselves, either with the current tools the app has, or enhanced ones?

Thanks!

1 Like
#14

Allow moderators to more easily resolve reported errors. We really want to focus on improving sentence quality.

Why not appoint some trusted users, who have high proficiency in the relevant languages, as extra volunteer moderators to correct errors? (Not me as I’m not proficient enough, but many others are.) I just did a round of the French Fast Track that had two glaring errors: “boullir” for “bouillir” and “comfortables” for “confortables”. They’ve been corrected on Tatoeba, but are still wrong here. Even I could fix errors that are this clear.

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#15

I suggest @kalzem for a French moderator. He / she is a native speaker who has helpfully responded to the French-specific questions I’ve posted on the forum.

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#16

Haha thanks @kadrian
If indeed there is a moderation feature on sentences, I would gladly like to help for the French language!

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#17

Duolingo demonstrates that there’s huge potential to harness volunteer labour to improve programs like this. The Duolingo French moderators are excellent and they’re all carefully chosen volunteers.

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#18

I think the reason is rather that the forum is only open to paying users, not to everyone. Surely, this is set to make paying for it more attractive but since Clozemaster is certainly a lot smaller than Duolingo for example and a lot younger, the paying community just isn’t that large yet.
Probably, it would help to open up the forum to everyone, or at least some categories/basic functionalities - or a limited number of topic creations per month - to make it more frequently utilised by more users.

And I certainly agree with @Kalzem and @kadrian, we need community moderators (would be happy to support German-learners :))

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#19

I also think the forum should be open to all users. It is just too quiet otherwise, and probably will be for a long time unless something is done differently.

To me, the fact that you get unlimited listening sentences with a paid subscription is enough to make the cost very worthwhile. I cheerfully paid for Clozemaster after using it for three days and usually use the listening function for an hour or more a day. By comparison, I’ve never become a paid user of Duolingo, despite having a 1,398-day streak, since there’s no additional content or functionality for paid users except not having to see ads.

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#20

This is all excellent feedback - thanks!

We are indeed working to add support for moderators. @Kalzem and @dlobok I’ll reach out to you soon if you are indeed interested.

Part of the reason for keeping the forum for Pro users only is to help with quality control.

What do you guys think of making the sentence discussions separate from the forum? In this way we’d have the forum just for discussions like this and other language learning topics. As is I wonder if all the sentence discussion posts drown out post like this.

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#21

Hi Mike, yes, I totally agree with keeping the sentence discussions posts separate. As per my earlier comment, I’d suggest that the sentence notes don’t appear under ‘Latest Posts’ and only appear within the specific forum for the target language, or even not at all, they could just appear against the sentence itself but still allow the moderator access to all sentence comments, for quality control reasons. Cheers

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#22

Does Duolingo have much trouble with quality control given that their discussion forums are open to all users? I’m not aware that they do, but it’s possible that moderators are deleting posts before I see them. Especially if you appoint some community moderators, I don’t see quality control as a big reason to restrict use to paid users only.

I’d be happy to see the sentence discussions moved, but I like being able to easily access the comments on the French sentences, so I wouldn’t like them not to appear at all. I often learn something from the discussion, especially when native speakers clarify things.

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#23

From what I can tell on r/Clozemaster, full of free Reddit users with no link to a Clozemaster account, the worst of it is the occasional meme which can be funneled into a humor/off-topic section.

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#24

I really had DuoLingo waste a lot of my time, the threadsd were a mixed blessing.

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#25

Well Karab, basically I have spent my time practising languages with Clozemaster, the error rate is high enough to generate queries for intercambio friends, partly this is due to lumping English & Spanish in as one language.
The facts is, I wasted an awful lot of time with DuoLingo because they tempted you into comments on the question and/or getting involved in the forum. Feedback to them was totally wasted as they introduced a horrible new system which made the app unusuable and negative customer response was supressed.
Perhaps a button to discuss a translation/thread would be useful. As it is, I’ve reported some very obvious errors between German & Spanish for instance, but often ones that Google Translate might well be prone to (informal singual/plural you and formal you confusion for example; it’s almost as if stuff was just translated to/from English with Germans and Spanish taking different descisions).

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#26

Haha I may be guilty of posting memes on the Clozemaster discussion pages from time to time!

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#27

Part of the reason for keeping the forum for Pro users only is to help with quality control.

I find the Forums here a blessed, spam-free oasis compared to other sites I frequent. Opening it up would be a disaster I am afraid.

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#28

Please please no memes, no frills, no spam. Keep it clean, keep it Pro.

This is a great site, “Mike” liaises with us regularly, a luxury compared to other sites, so respect indeed, all will be well.

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#29

@mike As per plea further up, please keep it clean, keep it Pro. Otherwise it will become just like the other place from which most of us have escaped.

If it’s occasionally quiet, no problem. Quality over quantity any day.

Best to you and your team!

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#30

So, given the last two comments it appears that I am going to put forward what may be the contrarian view (ooh, “contrarian”, I like that word - must use it more often).

I believe that there is a difference between the discussions that we have about Clozemaster itself, and the discussions that we have that are related to languages/sentences.

For my part, I do agree that having the discussions about Clozemaster itself kept to Pro users is probably a good thing. My reasons for sitting on the Pro-only side of the debate for these types of discussions are numerous. A large part of the reason is that what we discuss such as features, feature requests, “how best to use Clozemaster” type discussions etc., are typically very heavily biased towards - or reliant on - features that are only open to Pro users. In these cases I’m not sure of the added value that might come from having non-subscribers being able to participate in these discussions. I would conjecture that periodically, the contributions from some non-subscribers would be mostly about appeals/requests/demands to have those Pro-only features made available in the free version.

On the subject of opening up sentence discussions to non-Pro users, I have a very different opinion.

With the single exception of Italian, there is hardly anybody engaging in sentence discussions from the Pro community. Italian typically has around 5 to 10 people who will contribute to discussions, and amongst those people there is one person who is a native speaker who sometimes offers advice and contributions (together with @Floria7 using her madrelingua contact as an “external consultant”). The only other languages that occasionally appear to have multiple contributors are Spanish and (infrequently) German.

In other languages there are normally no more than 3 people contributing, typically it is just 2 people, and some of those are almost student-tutor discussions where a native speaker is kind enough to provide the clarifications, tips and advice to a learner. For many languages, the sentence “discussion” is simply someone posting a comment about a sentence and … that is the end of the “discussion”, as there is nobody out there with whom to discuss.

This has been mentioned on several occasions on this forum as something that limits people’s enjoyment, or that people see as a weakness, of Clozemaster, such as in this recent example mentioned by @galning -

I believe that opening up sentence discussions to non-subscribers would be beneficial, particularly for languages and language pairings that do not have a large user-base of current contributors (which is pretty much everything that isn’t Italian). Given that Clozemaster has a much smaller user-base than Duolingo the other place, I don’t think that this would make the Forum too noisy - particularly as the sentence discussions section is excluded from the “Latest” feed and front page of the Forum.

Also, there is very little discussion that goes on in the “Language Specific” category, and so again that could be something that could be worth considering opening up.

Furthermore, there could be a good argument to open up the Bug Reports section to non-subscribers as well, given that we would all benefit from the reporting (and resolution) of bugs.

The idea of having selected categories that were open to non-subscribers is something that @mike seemed happy with 2 years ago -

I would be very happy to hear what people think about opening up the sentence discussions (and possibly language specific and/or bug reports) categories to both Pro and non-Pro users, and leaving the rest as Pro-only.

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#31

The thought of this respectful, friendly, helpful place becoming another free-for-all with spam, grooming and angst just like the other place, sends shivers. Still, I’m sure our @mike will consider all angles before letting this happen. Will keep the faith meantime:-)

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#32

Having been a very active contributor on LiveMocha back in the day, I do really believe in the power of a large number of native speakers that can be harnessed even in free language communities, and I do think that the whole Clozemaster community (both free users, but especially Pro users of any of the less used non-Italian/German/Spanish/Swedish/… language pairings as you’ve indeed pointed out) could benefit from opening up at the very least the Sentence Discussion section to all Clozemaster users.

Especially since this forum already uses the Discourse platform, thus perhaps it would be possible to realise some sort of implementation where free users start off on a lower “trust” level, initially only being able to read, and perhaps “like” posts. Then only being able to post after reaching a certain level of having read content on the forums (>x hours spent browsing a minimum of y threads on the forum over the course of at least z days). And perhaps even then for their first x posts, needing sign-off (manual approval) before the posts going live, and not being able to edit them.

I know the Duolingo community, and the community on other online forums, is much larger, and thus also more likely to attract spammers, but being a voluntary moderator myself on one of these larger communities, I do know what an intensive effort it can be to battle spam bots, who post anything from NSFW spam, to “Report/essay writing” spam, to “Buy fake IDs”, etc. when there is absolutely no threshold required, which might be the case if the Sentence Discussions were opened as a free-for-all without any such “posting barriers” in place.

Thus, my take on it is this:

I think opening up the Sentence Discussions (and Bug Reports indeed, I hadn’t even ever considered that, but it could work in the same fashion) to more active non-Pro native speakers would definitely benefit the Clozemaster community overall,

but

I would definitely be very cautious about how to do so, making it quite a steep threshold for being able to post, which should hopefully dissuade most spammers.

And some sort of active (voluntary) moderation might still be needed to deal with any potential dedicated spammers/trolls if proceeding as such.

Without any kind of initial posting restrictions in place (or too mild ones), I would fear that sooner or later spammers and trolls would descend on the forum indeed, and would take a huge amount of utility as well as enjoyment out of it for all of us, including the Clozemaster team (mike and co.).

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