It seems that lessons by Irene777 have disappeared from the library.
What happened to them? Can you please get them back? They were excellent.
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Disappointing. I’m not sure I looked at much of her content, but that’s the one thing that has bothered me about LingQ 5.0. Many of the lessons by Vera, Evgueny, and Irene based on your post, have disappeared or become inaccessible. At best hard to find. They all have/had such great content, especially for the beginner/intermediate levels that it’s a shame they aren’t featured more prominently. For those that are new to the language these are the content providers I have suggested (if needing to be spoon fed some good content).
Even as I look at the Guided Courses section, there are tons of novels and other things that aren’t remotely “Guided Courses”, so there’s a lot of clutter in this section. Faust? Really?
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I find this situation fundamentally dishonest. I have paid for a premium membership based on the lessons I could see as a free user. Taking away these lessons after I have paid for the access amounts to a practice similar to bait-and-switch.
Edit: at minimum they could have communicated it better that these lessons can go away at any moment.
Edit2: In case Irene sees this: thank you for your lessons, they were among the best.
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Well, it could be that those providers decided to limit those courses to only those they are tutoring, or they (content providers) simply want to take them off the platform for whatever reason. LingQ would have not control of that, unless they “bought” them. However, the fact that some of this occurred on the conversion to 5.0 makes me wonder a little if it’s more that they are just “lost”…or didn’t get converted, etc.
I’ve brought it up in the past but didn’t get much traction.
Not sure on the Irene thing. I can see her name pop up on the content search under the “provider” section, but no lessons come up after selecting her name.
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To me it seems that her subscription expired. But wiping the courses of a prolific lesson author just because her subscription expired is very heavy handed. Why punish everyone? She had lessons on the site from 2013, her lessons were among the highest quality german lessons on LingQ. Why wipe her content?
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I am not sure if that’s the case, I thought the free account lesson limits only applied to private lessons - not public.
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I agree. Losing these lessons from the library would be a huge loss. Although, I have also wondered how on earth new users would ever find them.
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I’m really distressed about this situation. Her lessons just disappeared from my playlists, no warnings, no notifications, nothing. This makes no sense, as the majority of beginner/intermediate level guided courses were made by her. Besides, she made excellent content, she is my favourite creator. I’m extremely sad and disappointed that her lessons vanished overnight, I did not expect that content could just become unavailable at any time. If it was deliberate on Lingq’s part for whatever reason, I find it a terrible decision.
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Zoran should give an official explanation about this. Their lessons could be used for the purpose of shadowing since they are not too long. It is sad indeed that they can not be used again. I mean even for advanced learners they can use them at any time for shadowing or some other purpose.
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Sorry folks. We recently deleted a large amount of data from dormant accounts. It looks like Irene’s account got caught up in this process as she hasn’t been around in quite some time. We are now working to restore her account. Thanks for letting us know. Irene is one of our original prolific content providers who contributed greatly when LingQ first launched. However, what this has done is pointed out that her content should be in the Guided Course. We will hopefully get all of this done soon.
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Thanks a lot for addressing this!
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@mark Why have you deleted courses from dormant accounts if they were used? Shouldn’t you check before if there are many users doing those lessons? Don’t you have statistics on those?
I have stopped relying on Lingq’s courses because this is something that happened other times, but it is not a good practice at all. I read a book and at certain point it disappears! Not the best for sure.
@ericb100 mentioned above about lessons from Vera and Evgueny as well, that seemed to be deleted or hard to find too. I have done a lot of lessons from those users because for beginners they were great.
You should find a way to handle shared material in a different way, maybe transferred that to your account or something like this.
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I apologize again. It looks like we won’t be able to recreate those lessons since we don’t have backups of those audio files. Unless anyone of you may have downloaded the audio at some point. We will attempt to reach out to Irene to see if she still has the originals. We have stopped our removal script, which is still running, in order to add logic to skip account deletion for accounts that share lessons. But, it’s too late for Irene’s account. Unfortunately, this issue wasn’t identified in our testing.
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And you guys don’t keep backups?
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We don’t back up audio I’m afraid. We only back up the data in the database.
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This is the first time we have deleted accounts like this in quite a long time. It seems strange that other LingQ courses have been removed from your account. Even if lessons you have taken are made private, they should remain in your account. Can you remember some of the lessons that were removed so we can figure out why that happened?
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@mark for one reason or another, it doesn’t really matter, we get used to continuous problems. But it’s Christmas and I want to keep a good mood.
Here’s an example from a week ago, a book disappeared and the answer was because the audio got broken (probably from another update): https://forum.lingq.com/t/albert-camuss-the-stranger-l%C2%B4%C3%A9tranger-in-french-disappeared/154383
I definitely don’t remember the books, but it happened to me at least 3 times, two times with other French books.
The problem is that, for whatever reason, if I cannot be sure a content will be removed or not before starting, I don’t even bother to start it anymore.
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Thats just sad. You guys running wipe script without proper backups. I am speechless 
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FYI. Here’s one of the long beginner courses that Vera1 has…why is this not under Guided Courses? This is one of the ones I used most in the beginner stages:
https://www.lingq.com/en/learn/de/web/library/course/32227
That needs to be there. I’m not sure why full books are actually under Guided Courses in the German section. Not sure if that’s typical across the languages. Those should be under Books section.
Maybe there needs to be a way of marking/flagging the content of some of prolific contributors so their content is better featured and more prominent. Most of it is way better than anything that’s been imported by others. Vera, Evgueny, Irene, etc.
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I have an idea on how to save the audio files.
Android applications most likely still have these audio files in their audio cache.
Implement a way to export the content of the audio cache into the SD card. This could be a menu item in the settings.
- A storage access framework dialog would come up, asking the user to select a writable directory
- All the mp3 files would get copied to this directory
- Then people would be able to share these mp3 files
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