I just received about ten mails notifying edits in my shared lessons by the same person, and while checking what it was, I noticed some issues that I’m sure everyone is aware of, but that I thought it wouldn’t hurt to remember.
-It takes ages to check what was actually changed. I have to use a third party app to compare texts, and even then it’s difficult. Maybe I’m not doing it correctly?
-Even when it’s a good correction, there is not really any reason for me to not go back to the original, where I have already made a lingQ with the “bad-formatted” version of it (I am talking about Japanese, where a lot of those are bad-formatted by default)*,**.
-Personally, I don’t get why the option “Going back to the original” doesn’t automatically saves it.
-And you still have to check it, because you never know if someone is like deleting a whole paragraph (and as far as I know, the edited text goes live instantly, over the original uploader text, which is also a thing that doesn’t make any sense to me…)
-Even though I just unshared the whole course I’m still getting notifications…
Now, I’ve checked this persons profile and it just seems like a new user with no bad intentions (as in no spam), but there is no way for me to inform him that he is just wasting his time (and mine) doing this…
*As an example, the writer 新美南吉 is parsed 新美 南 吉 (with spaces), and I’ve already made a lingQ out of it… so why would I want someone else fixing it back to 新美南吉 (or 新美 南吉) and force me to make a new lingQ? (noting that 新美 南 吉 is the default parsing, so even if I fix it once, I’ll have to edit it again in every other lesson, or just resign to never use the “Resplit Text” option)
**This makes me wonder how would the improved parsing work for Japanese in the future, do we have any insight on the matter?
Edit: Honestly I wish there was a clickable option in the “Edit Lesson” tab, to not allow people to edit your content if you don’t want to.
Three days after I made the whole course private, I’m still getting 3-4 notifications per day… by this same person… that of course, for the reasons above, I have to undo.
So I have a couple questions: In such a case, what is the point of unsharing a course, when obviously people who opened it before can still have access to it? and what I’m I supposed to do from my side to prevent this to happen again in the future (besides not sharing anything again…)?
Hi！Now I happened to see your message. I actually made some edits to the text as I thought it was a collaborative thing. The platform interprets as a learned word situations like this, for example, “た” “しかめる”, where the word is “たしかめる”, i.e. just one word with its correct meaning according to the context.
I made the adjustment in the text, taking out the spaces in those situations, since there is that option.
If this bothered you, I’m sorry. I won’t even go near your texts again. I don’t make a point of getting involved in big discussions because of it.
You could avoid some of this trouble if you just complete your lessons before you share them, unless you like to revisit your lessons many times over a longer period of time.
Hi there!
First of all, I took care of not quoting any names in the post, and the message you received was private. Of course if you don’t want to read them because of this, I’m sorry, and I honestly feel bad about this whole thing because I’m sure you just wanted to help.
It really should be a collaborative thing, but especially for Japanese, editing the automatic parsing just ends up mixing up other’s people lingQs…
That being said, the point of the post was that, at least in my opinion, we are lacking a way to prevent people from editing content that the uploader doesn’t want edited (for whatever reason), and that the whole “editing” and “collaborative” part of it is sadly a hassle at the moment.
That is what I always do, but as you said, I like to revisit my lessons from time to time…
This made me think, is it even possible to not be emailed each time someone edits one of your lessons (maybe for a particular language)? Does someone know?
We’ll see what we can do to improve this in the upcoming update. We want to make easier for content providers to identify changes that were made. I’ll see if adding an option to prevent editing is something we can do too.
Did a search to find this topic. Just to say this needs fixing. I’m having well-intentioned but adverse changes being made to my material and can’t message the user making them: “recipient: Forbidden recipient”
Yeah… came back from a week off just to see 100+ mails of edits that I don’t want to check, including some user whose name I can’t even find in the forums (so I can’t even tell him), who also changed the picture of the lesson (why is this a thing?). And as usual, I unshared the lesson but those making the edits still have access to it…*
I think I’m done complaining, I’ll just not share anything until they fix it, which seeing their interest in the matter probably won’t be very soon.
*I also have extra views on lessons of the same course that I never shared (as in, they don’t even have audio lol, it’s not like I fat-fingered)… to say that I really don’t know who has access to it and who doesn’t (or rather, that people who shouldn’t have access do have it…)
edit: I still don’t see why it’s so hard to have a togglable button in the “edit course” tab that says “do not allow other users to edit this course”…
Hello Rafa, this is Sahra from LingQ content team. I’m So sorry for the inconvenience caused! I understand how frustrating this must be receiving tons of email notifications from us.
Let me explain what’s going on and why your shared lessons are being edited. As you might know we are preparing ourselves to launch LingQ 5.0 very soon and since the design of the library shelves is different in version 5.0 many of the old (current) images don’t look really good. Therefore we are replacing some of them. Also we are adding proper tags to the lessons to sit in the correct library shelve and sometimes we might make little changes to titles too which of course doesn’t happen a lot.
Now to be able to do all these we should first convert the lessons to the new version which automatically puts the lesson title inside the lesson text. This is how it works in version 5.0.
So to make the story short, we are trying to adapt the available content to LingQ 5.0 and all these changes are either being made by content team or our librarians. I promise this won’t take long and hope you kindly keep your content shared like before.
Btw, Beta is open to everyone and you can see how lessons look like in the libraries shelves.
Thanks and sorry again.
Sahra
I have just gotten 3 emails in the last day, telling me that 3 lessons have been edited. Like you, I have no idea what they changed, and can’t even figure out how to find the members who did it. Very frustrating! How can I trust random strangers to edit my lessons - lessons which still have me as the submitter? I don’t want to take responsibility for someone else’s potentially incorrect edits. Kind of makes me not want to share…
Well I’m sorry to hear that. I’m on the same boat and honestly it doesn’t seem like they care at all.
I recently learned that you can’t even delete shared content. So now, not only you can’t even know what’s being edited, you can’t either prevent it from happening, at that’s for ever…
Fun times.
I quote @nsprung: “Yes, not being able to delete content other users have opened is intended. You shouldn’t share any lesson that you wouldn’t want a user to have access to forever…”
It’s so sad when the answer to this issue given by people working in the app is like, welp don’t share stuff lol.
You can read the message @zoran posted 8 months ago down in this post. Not only they didn’t add an option to block user’s edits, but it’s actually more difficult (read impossible) now to pinpoint what’s being edited*… I feel it’s more noticeable now because the new “editing in sentence mode” in v5 makes it easier for people to make edits (I’ve never had THIS many edits before).
I was rereading the OP, and sadly nothing has changed… Japanese parsing is still atrocious and, although well-intentioned, editing spaces still mixes up lingQs. The system as it is doesn’t make any sense to me.
Anyway, it’s their decision and my opinion is of little value. The only thing I can do is exactly what I’ve been told, and that is to not share anything in the future, which I will.
*I’ve tried to figure how it works in v5, but the mails I receive redirect you to v4, and when manually opened in v5 the edit lesson tab doesn’t tell you anything
Hi there, see the reply from sahra.lingq below explaining the situation. Given the imminent rollout of LingQ 5.0, I’d say the staff and librarians of LingQ currently really ramping up the lesson conversion process. (That’s my best guess as to what’s going on anyway!)
Exactly, we aren’t really editing lessons in term of changing the text, we are just converting all lessons to a new format (for 5.0 launch). Sorry about the confusion everyone!
Obviously, there needs to be some way to see the “history” (editing history) of a document to see which changes were made and how. Hopefully this will be included in the future.
I have had some of my lessons edited and I couldn´t see what had been changed. I just hoped the changes were to correct something that was wrong and that the changes themselves were correct - and moved on. I have also edited some small errors in grammar and such in other people´s lessons, but I felt bad not being able to show them exactly what it was I changed, without having to possibly bother them by sending them as message.
Exactly, I have the same feeling in case I see a possible mistake and I’d like to correct it. The fact that the owner can’t see the change doesn’t reassure me at all, not only for communicating any change but also to be sure that the changes I’ve done were correct. Otherwise it could be a real mess.
Anyway, I’m glad that there are people that share content so please, even with these problems, it’s always better to keep sharing if you are willing to do so.
Personally, I don´t care if other LingQ users edit my shared lessons (at least, as long as it isn´t some kind of vandalism).
However, today alone I received more than 20 emails telling me that someone changed something in one of my shared lessons.
As rokkvi wrote, without a “history” function it´s almost impossible to know what has been changed or not. So is it possible to turn off this email notification completely because these emails are just noise (i.e. they have no practical value whatsoever)?
After being flooded with about 30 “edited lessons” emails yesterday, I found an option to “opt out” at the bottom of those emails.
So it should be possible to no longer receive those useless notifications.