@vera I can see why you’re angry.
I found some in my English slot too. I’m still angry.
@Vera
Ich empfehle Dir, Dein Anliegen direkt bei der betreffenden Person, zu platzieren.
Auf der Profilseite,auf Deutsch.
Es gibt auch Nutzer,welche keine Zeit im Forum verbringen.
und
Es gibt auch Nutzer mit Deutscher Muttersprache, welche Französisch lernen, aber all die Englischen Anleitungen, wie LingQ zu nutzen ist, nicht verstehen.
Wenn sie geflaggt sind,sind sie ja noch nicht gelöscht.
Ich glaube kaum, dass sich jemand die Zeit nimmt und böswillig Deine Einträge löscht.
j:-)
@ Vera
Could you post an example of one of your informationful hints? I am interested to see how you do it. I sometimes flag hints (from German to English, so not yours) when the format is so ridiculously complex that it is completely meaningless to anyone but the person who made it. I do it for the sake of people who will come across the hint, but I didn’t think that this could lead to other peoples hard made hints being deleted from their accounts.
(Btw ‘informationful’ is not a real word. I could not think of an appropriate adjective.)
If I like one of the hints, I choose it not paying attention to the black flags at all.
But in 70% I don’t like any of the hints and I look up the word in the on-line dictionary or even from some of the dictionaries.
@Jolanda: They were definitely deleted, not only flagged. Flagged hints are not the problem. Someone must have them deleted them intentionally in the “Hint editor”.
@Colin: They should only be flagged if they are WRONG. People who prefer less complex hints can simply choose the shorter ones. In most cases one the shorter hints is the first that is shown. So this should not be a big issue.
@Evgueny: I for myself look up EVERY word because I never trust Google translate or the other users hints (sorry). Often I look them up in different dictionaries too like you 
I think this way I spend more time on a LingQ which makes it stick better to my mind.
@Colin: Here are some examples of my complexer hints
LingQ: pries
Hint: prier: priés (Participe passé) v. (Auxiliaire : avoir) bitten;inständig bitten
LingQ: vols
Hint: le vol (m) n. Flug, Fliegen, Rauben, Diebstahl
LingQ: renseigne
Hint: renseigner:je renseigne, il renseigne v. (Auxiliaire : avoir) informieren, erkundigen, ausfüllen, orientieren, mitteilen… // renseigné, renseignée adj. informiert
LingQ: t’aime
Hint: te=dich // aimer: j’aime v. (Auxiliaire : avoir) lieben; mögen; schätzen
LingQ: jaunes
Hint: jaune,jaune, jaunes adj. gelb / le jaune (m) n. Gelb
LingQ: jolies
Hint: joli, jolie, jolis, jolies adj. hübsch; nett; lieblich; schmuck; schön
LingQ: faits
Hint: le fait (m) faits (pl) n. Sache, Tatsache … / faire: faits (Participe passé) v. (Auxiliaire : avoir) machen; lassen; ablegen; absolvieren …
This business of deleting the wrong hint is indeed problematic! The idea that someone can come along and delete wrong, right, and “informationful” hints is disturbing! I often worry that my hints, sometimes 4 lines of hints for one word, will be deleted. I really hope that the LingQ Team considers remedying this problem, for it is a great problem.
@ Vera
Your hints don’t seem so complicated so I don’t why they would be deleted.
Some hints I come across are completely unreadable, even if somewhere in them, the correct information is hidden. I think such hints should be deleted since they are as useless as hints in the wrong language or no hints at all. However this is only if these hints are not then deleted from the account of the person who created them since this person can probably read them.
I have a feeling I know why your hints get flagged. You put a lot of French and the beginning of your hints before you get to the German. The space for a hint in the dashboard when one first looks at a new word is quite limited and it is likely that the German part of your hints are not visible. Therefore people will flag them thinking they are in the wrong language because all they see is French. Still, that explains why they get flagged, but I don’t know why your hints would get deleted.
Btw, when I talk about having flagged hints because they are unreadable, I am talking about maybe 10 hints or so out of all of the hints I have flagged, and I have flagged a lot. Last time I checked, the flagged hints on the ‘hint editor’ page for German to English were dominated by hints I had flagged.
@Colin:
I know that they got flagged because I start with the infinitive or the basic form, but this is the way I want to learn and I’m used to learn vocabulary. I and others have complained some time ago that the shown hint is too short. The LingQ stuff prefers short hints, that is fine. I was happy when we got the new “remark” field for a LingQ. I thought I cut put some of the information into it, but then I noticed that it is not shown at all, only when I OPEN the LingQ. So it is not what I need. I need it on the flashcards for example too, and I want to see it when I hover over a word.
As you said flagging is not the problem. The problem is that someone marked it and pressed “Delete” on the Hint Editor.
Example for flagging that should not result in deleting the hint: The German word “Klasse”
The translation “excellent” was taken 71 times and is marked 3 times as wrong. But this is not wrong. It is a meaning of this word too! Here it is an adverb.
Maybe the users thought that the following hint is better: The hint “class; Terrific!” was taken 49 times which maybe is the best one. The hint “(die Klasse; die Klassen) class adj. great, excellent” was taken 6 times only. So I wouldn’t DELETE the first hint which was marked 3 times. Then 71 people would find a message in their hint that the hint was deleted. I would simply unflag it.
The Hint Editor itself is a mess.
One point: I don’t want to check all the translations from English into any language. I just want to check the translation into German! Only LingQs where a German hint is flagged should be shown.
Another point: If hints in more than one language are marked you cannot “unflag” one language only. You can only unflag the whole LingQ. This is silly. Example: An English LingQ has hints in German, French, Hungarian and Russian marked as wrong. I know the German and French one are correct. But I cannot unflag the LingQ because I don’t know any Russian and Hungarian. Another user knows Hungarian and Russian and want to unflag the hint in these languages too. It is not possible. So this LingQ will stay forever in the list of Hints to check. That is why the list will become longer and longer. I stopped working on the hint editor because I often saw the same old entries that I could not finish because of this problem.
@Colin: I see what you mean. A lot of the German into English translations are other languages. I found a bunch of Czech for example. I guess this is because learners of these languages often set English as their dictionary language because there is not good dictionary in their own language available or they take the English hint and overwrite is with their own language without changing the flag into the correct language. Maybe some of these hints are from the time when we had no language flag beside the hint. I guess English is a very special case because lot of learners take it as a reference.
Edit / P.S. By the way these kind of “wrong” hints are easy to “repair”. I can move it to the correct language easily. What annoying is that I have to copy the hint into Google translate to get an idea of the correct language. It is a pity that LingQ can not make a suggestion or a guess what could be the correct language. If I move the hint to another language the user will not loose the hint. It will just appear with another flag
Two other points about the Hint Editor:
Moving a hint to another language is unbelievable slow.
You have to scroll a lot if you wand to correct a hint that is in the middle of the page.
@ Vera
I don’t think people flag your hints necessarily because you start with the infinitive form of words, probably it is because they don’t see any German in the hint window. I took one of your hints from the list above, and created a lesson with just that French word in it on my German account. The word was ‘renseigne’. I created a LingQ for that word using your hint.
LingQ: renseigne
Hint: renseigner:je renseigne, il renseigne v. (Auxiliaire : avoir) informieren, erkundigen, ausfüllen, orientieren, mitteilen… // renseigné, renseignée adj. informiert
Then I deleted the LingQ and selected the word again to see what one would see in the dashboard when they meet the word as new for the first time. Here is a screenshot
It just so happens that fourteen English speakers have already created LingQs for this French word on their German accounts, which surprised me a bit, but you can see your hint as the second user hint in the list. I would flag that if I saw it.
As I said, I don’t know why it got deleted. I flagged the LingQ that I made and went to the hint editor and found it. This is what I saw
Clearly the person who deleted your hints could see that there was German in them and not just French.
You are right. The hint editor page is a disaster. I don’t know how anybody can use it.
I think the quality of the user hints is a big issue that the people at LingQHQ don’t appreciate enough. It is not because I think that having exact hints is important for learning. I don’t think that. It is because I think that a lot of potential users are going to be very unimpressed when they see the hints. New users see a very professional looking website and excellent looking reading interface, and when they click on their first blue word, they expect excellent dictionary style translations of words. Instead, they get a list of terribly formatted, inconsistent, and ugly user hints. When I first signed up, I was so horrified by the user hints, that I dismissed the website as useless and went and used Learning With Texts for several weeks.
When I first signed up their were no hints of other users shown at all. You had to create each hint on your own. But you saw immediately the entry from Babylon which was quite good for English->German. That conviced me. Maybe I’m used to create my own hints, and not to rely on other member’s hints because that was exactly what I had to do from the beginning.
… Sorry …
Doubled post deleted. Don’t know why.
@VeraI, ColinJohnstone - Just a heads up, we’ve discussed the Hint Editor page several times over the past few months, and as recently as last week. We do have plans to update this page, but we’re focusing on some other things at the moment. We’ll keep your feedback above in mind as we look to improve this page further!
EDIT - In the meantime, we’ll also see if there is anything we can do to resolve the issue of existing hints being removed from people’s accounts.
Alex, can LingQ disable the Hint Editor for the time being? This is really important to us folks who personalize our lingqs. And like Vera, I like to create my own hints. Hints carry different meanings for different users.
LingQ encourages us to link, especially Steve; but what is the point of lingqing if you come back to the word and your effort has been erased?
I have to admit that I am not aware of this problem and have not come across it. We all use LingQ in different ways. I will be finding out more about the nature of this problem.
I would like to say, however, that for me, google translate and user hints are extremely valuable. They enable me to read and LingQ quickly, thereby exposing myself to lots of content. I quickly get the gist of a lesson, read it, listen to it and move on. If there are funny hints, then I go into a dictionary and find a better hint.
In Czech I was usually ahead of others, and had to rely mostly on google translate, which was very reliable. For Korean google translate is not very useful, and I am very happy to find user hints with 3 or more uses, but have to go the dictionary more often which really slows down my learning. I also open the dictionary to get the Chinese character or Hanja since that gives me a better sense of the meaning.