I saw that now the private lessons that I study are shown on facebook. Is this down by purpose or a bug?
That was done on purpose. These lessons will not be linked to but the notification that you studied a lesson will appear. This was done because the reading counter is moved by the lesson complete notification which was being blocked in order to suppress the notification for imported lessons. Kind of confusing I know… 
but it was done for a reason.
Yes, that’s true. As I import many contents, especially messages in LingQ Forum recently. Would it be possible to have a option to suppress the notification for imported lessons in the future? There may be some private lessons that we wouldn’t like to let everyone know.
Mark, there is the full title of the lesson including a link to the lesson on facebook! Nothing against a neutral message like on the profile saying that I study an imported lesson. That’s okay for me. But showing a full title of copyrighted material is not a good idea!
I’ve deleted the post on facebook. Maybe I’ll connect LingQ no longer to Facebook as long as private lessons are named by full name.
I am not sure how this sharing business works. Can we not choose which lessons to share and which not to share? Alex, Mark, help.
It’s as Mark said, but there appears to be a bug in how the priviate item is posted to Facebook. We’ll look into it getting this fixed soon.
My question Alex is the following. Do we have to choose to have all lessons shared to Facebook and Tweeter, or can we just share the ones we want to share?
For now it’s all lessons, as it posts whenever you hit the “LingQ’d” button. The previous issue (when it only posted non-private lessons) was that the words of reading weren’t automatically recorded, so this was a workaround for that.
Once this is fixed, private lessons that are studied will still be posted to Facebook and Twitter, but there will be no URL linking back to the lesson and the name of the lesson will not be posted either.
Then what is the purpose of the Share button on the lesson page? I thought that allowed me to decide what to share and where.
If you don’t have it set up to automatically share everything you study, it allows you to do exactly that. As not everyone wants to share all of their activities from the site on Facebook and/or Twitter, it allows members to share specific lessons through either of these sites or by email. Also, it allows you to share lessons that you haven’t yet clicked the “LingQ’d” button on.
It may be a dumb question but if I can choose what to share, and if I want to share an interesting item that I found on the web, why would I not want to be able to link back to the lesson? I think that linking back is a good thing.
This is only in the case of private lessons, as they may contain copyrighted material. Linking back to copyrighted material that members have imported (and not shared) is probably not the best idea. However, all lessons that are shared on the library will contain a URL linking back to the lesson when posted to Facebook or Twitter.
But if I find an interesting news item and mention it on my blog, this is OK. It seems to me that if something is available on the web we can point people to it. I guess the problem is that others could actually start studying it on LingQ which would equate to sharing the lesson. Is that it?
Steve, it is no problem to share a link to the original content. You can allways do this, and I believe the content owner will appreciate this. The problem is that it the link leads directly to the imported lesson. And that makes no sense, and it not clever. I’ve not tried what happens when people click on the link of such a lesson. Maybe they get an error message?
Vera, this was not done on purpose, but rather it was all in response to someone who wanted their reading stats from imported lessons to count. The programmer was not supposed to have the link come back to the lesson, but somehow did. Now I believe this problem is being sorted out.
Steve, I got that this wasn’t done on purpose by Alex explanation. I only want to answer your question, belonging to if you can mention news items on your blog, and explain the difference between the blog and the private LingQ lesson. Private lessons should be private. Otherwise “external people” could think that you make such lessons available for your members.
An aside: The sharing lessons function for Twitter is the most boring thing I can think of. There’s nothing as off-putting as seeing a list of “I have just …”. Twitter, for me, is about short, sharp info, not about endless sameness. I am actually thinking of unfollowing some people who are diligent students (which I find admirable) simply because of this endless stream of non-info. I’d much rather read manually generated tweets. I am not sure whether ‘any publicity’ is really better in this case…
Gosh, I must have been in a grumpy mood to have written the above comment!
But it’s more or less true… We would like to take advantage of Twitter but I’m not sure this is a good way. We are trying to decide if it makes sense just to remove Twitter from the automated sharing function. Or, to remove the automated sharing function completely. However, it works much better on Facebook where at least the lesson and lesson image are shown. Should we add the lesson title to the Twitter posts if we can? Can you think of a better way of doing this? Should we just not bother with automated posting to Twitter? to Facebook? What do all of you think?