Yay for those recent fixes, especially the reader toggle.
Some minor issues:
*I get an error message every time I try to ‘like’ a lesson: (SyntaxError: Unexpected token < in JSON at position 2 Please check your Internet connection and visit our Twitter feed for system status updates.)
*We can’t see who’s been sending us all those ‘likes’ ( ͡° ͜ʖ͡°), nor who’s liked someone else’s comments.
*We can’t toggle our friends’ language statistics in different languages like before - we can only do so presently if we select the given language as our (fake) learning language. And no, I’m not a stalker ( ͡° ͜ʖ͡°); others’ statistics can be interesting or encouraging. Cheers
Well, finally it’s Sunday, even on the West Coast, by now. I’m still hoping some things will be improved Monday morning or at least some time next week.
There is an urgent problem for me:
Can I REQUEST a conversation or else can students request a conversation from me?
If a tutor does not want to offer regular slots, how can they be a tutor then?
There is also the problem of not seeing conversation times on a tutor’s profile page.
As for my previously mentioned problem, regarding points that were deducted (balance adjustment), I am waiting for an answer during next week. Unless I get convincing justification or my points back, I won’t provide any new content or recordings on LingQ.
LingQ is taking their commission on completed conversations right away now instead of when you cash out. So, the points that have been deducted from your account would have been lost, under the old system, when you cashed out.
Yes, all these problems are really important - no requests from students or tutors, lack of 15-minute slot, difficulties with the list of friends, impossible to see a rose and say thank you for it etc, etc.
But Reinhard, Zoran answered me (I have also deducted points) that they deducted 25% of the points for 17 July, but from this date they will deduct only 15% of tutoring, but right away.
The new Update is great!
But in the Vocabulary Section it seems I can’t go to the next page if the number of items is more than 200!? In addition to it, there is no word-count. Are these functions gone?
Thank you for the explanation. It still isn’t the nicest thing because any exchange conversation (15 minutes) thus costs $ 0.75, which does not seem much, but over the year with just three regular exchange conversations it adds up to $ 117.00. Having to choose 30 minutes minimum, this means $ 234. Solution: sign up only every other week and get/write a report. Then at least the cost of 15 minutes conversations stays the same. Of course there is still another solution: have private conversations without using LingQ, this can’t be in the company’s interest.
I understand the system costs money to maintain etc., but this comes on top of premium membership ($ 109.00). Will content providers still get the shared lessons award or even a hike 
?
Thank you, Evgueny. There is another problem: if someone gifted points to another member, is this seen as tutoring income or will it be treated the same way as points you bought?
Also why indicate the price of tutoring services in dollars and you have to pay in points? Yes, I know paying members get 50% off points purchases. But it is still not clear enough.
Buy 2000 points as a paying member. This gives you 1 hour of conversation on average for $ 20.00 (ignoring the discounts for more points).
Buy 2000 points as a non-paying member for $ 40.00, you end up with how many hours of conversation? It still says e.g. $ 20.00/hr on a tutor’s profile.
As for me, this means it should say “Points per hour” not dollars per hour.
Ahh…good catch. We will get that added back.
That’s true but a lot of beginner lessons do have one or more of these resources. What we have done now is to add a dropdown switch beside the Full Text button so that you can see the Resources more easily. We plan on adding an indicator to show there are additional resources as well.
I think all gifted points will be deducted for 15% because they were before deducted for 25% by cashing out.
But before if you use the points for new conversations in any language they were not deducted at all. I didn’t see such an oppotunuty now because the deduction is fulfilled right away aftter you send a repoirt… So instead of 1000 points for a 30-minute conversation you will receive 850.
And I’m strongly comcerned about the eliminition of 15-minute conversations because 75% of my students prefered such a time., especially during Russian cionversations as Russian is a quite difficult language and an intermediate student would be tighed after more than 15 minutes of speaking in Russian.
I even have to reduce my fee to 18 USD for an hour, but I’m afraid that it helps not much. And also I offer 10% discoiunt for a learner who pays for 10 my lessons in advance.
Award shared lessons isn’t deducted, but I notice that this award is reduced almost every month for one or two last years although the quantitity of my taken lessons is not redeced, but even risen.
Partly, it is because of a richer choice, but first of all because lingq.com use only (or mostly) expired points for paying for shared lessons. And the learners are more accurate and don’t let expiring their points.
And now when these points will be expired after a year, so the providors will probably receive even less for their shared lessons. Alas!..
We can speak about the reasonobility of our new lessons under such unfair circumstances next time on Skype.
The old system where you can request conversations with tutors who had no posted time is no longer available. When we introduced this feature, we hoped it would be popular but, unfortunately, it didn’t prove to be so. In general, our Exchange features including speaking and writing correction are under-utilized relative to our reading/LingQing/listening features. We could have simply removed those features but we have chosen to try and improve them. To bring them to the level of the competition in this space. That is why these changes were made.
I’m sorry some of you longtime LingQ members/tutors were surprised and are having trouble adjusting. We do recognize the valuable contributions you have made to LingQ. We will be sending out a message next week to all tutors explaining the changes.
You should also notice that a majority of the complaints here are from long time LingQ tutors. That confirms to us that we haven’t kept up in the area of tutoring. We don’t attract new tutors to the platform and our offering suffers. We need both tutors and learners using the tutoring features or the marketplace doesn’t work. Right now, a small handful of tutors and learners use these features. This has to change or we will simply remove all of this functionality. Leaving things as they were was not an option.
We, therefore, had to choose which features to keep and continue to maintain and which changes needed to be made in order to keep up and compete with other similar services. We have many language learners on LingQ. There is no reason our tutoring shouldn’t be more active. It is up to us to make our services more attractive. In the long run, once the dust has settled on the changes, it should benefit you, our tutors, most of all.
Please be patient as we work out the kinks. We should all benefit in the long run.
@alleray - As Solanderdog mentioned, we deducted the commission on all existing points earned from tutoring from all members before we made the change. We used to have a system where we deducted the commission right away, at some point we made the switch to only deducting the commission when you cashed in. This resulted in a lot more work for us in trying to keep the different types of points separate since some points had commission to be collected while others didn’t. We hoped this would result in more users simply exchanging conversation but that wasn’t the case. We are now going back to taking the commission right away but we are now only taking 15%.
Yes, there is an inconsistency there regarding the dollar value. We will fix it to show correctly based on your tier. Thanks for pointing that out. We want to show the dollar value so the cost is clearer to new members.
As for gifted points, they would typically not be subject to the commission unless it was obvious that a member was simply gifting points back and forth to avoid expiration and the points were earned from tutoring.
We can’t prevent you from doing as you like. We feel the functionality on LingQ provides value but that is for you to decide. We have to do what will work best for ourselves and the majority of LingQ members.
Regarding shared lessons, we do plan on maintaining lesson awards even though we will no longer be expiring a significant number of points. We will simply pay that cost as we recognize that our content contributors need to be compensated.
Although I’m new to LingQ, it has really helped my reading progress, and I’m really happy with my experience thus far! I know that in the tech world, companies have to innovate or die, so I understand why LingQ has to continue to change. I’m definitely getting my money’s worth out of my LingQ subscription, and I’m happy about that.
@job86 - 1) You should see your most recent 4 lessons in the top of the sidebar at right?
2) Yes, this change was made. We get a lot of feedback from users overwhelmed by all the features at LingQ. We have tried to quieten things down and make more features available on demand. Hopefully, you will get used to the changes.
There is always a tug of war between making it easier for new users to get started and more convenient for power users.
@Ozemite - Thanks, we’ll fix the liking issue on lessons. Seeing the list of users who liked comments is also in our list already. Likewise, the ability to toggle through other user’s languages. Please give us some time to get all this stuff working.
Reducing your commission to 15% is great news. The other site I teach on takes a whopping 30%, though that goes down, slowly, as you complete more and more sessions. I’m not sure, but I highly doubt it ever goes down to 15%.
Being able to set my own rate is also a much-appreciated improvement, thanks. While I’m dishing out the good vibrations, I should also say that I appreciate how quickly LingQ always pays me. On the other site, I must submit a request for payment and that can take 15 to 45 days to even be acknowledged.
Still, I need to have complete control over my schedule. I should be able to determine the length of sessions that I offer and choose how soon, and how far into the future, students can book me. I really hope to see improvements to the scheduling system here.
I was told I was not on the list. On the Chinese tutor list, only Steve is the valid tutor. Others are ghosts that were alive long time ago. Also, I cannot see my timetable since I pressed the save button so I don’t know if it is properly set up.
Those graphs and statistics should be able to be put away with one hit of a button. It is too in your face occupying so much space.