@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.
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.
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?
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.
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:
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.
If anyone is able to do this, that would be great. Whichever files can be recovered can be re-uploaded for all. We are making sure that audio backups will be in place going forward.
I could do it, but first the Android application needs a feature that enables exporting the audio cache. Can you guys implement this feature for the android application?
This function will be enabled with the next Android update. Let us know how it goes. You can email those files to support and we can then recreate the lessons.
Years ago I took practically all of these lessons plus some others by an Austrian provider (Sorry, can’t remember his name). I don’t know if I could still access them or not. But I don’t remember the names of the courses to search for them in my library.
Edit: Reinhardt is the Austrian provider. He and Evgueny did German lessons together.
And I must chime in: These early lessons were some of the best content available in LingQ.
It’s ironic that they were lost since I usually have the opposite problem. I share my own private lessons with my students. There are some lessons that I know aren’t needed anymore, but the system won’t let me delete them because they are “in use”.
Mark, I have updated to the latest version 5.5.31 (458) that has been released on Jan 1, 2024; but I can not find a the feature that would allow me to export the audio cache.
Can you please give me some hint on where to find this feature in the new version?
