I am sorry, but I have the feeling that the people who design and implement such web forms never use them (i.e. for uploading lessons). VeraI & TroisRoyaumes mentioned already the main points.
@nd71 - thanks for the feedback. All the employees at LingQ are using the site for personal learning as well as testing. As Alex has mentioned, we are working on fixing some issues. Hopefully, it will work better very soon.
Field “text”: This field is required.
Are you kidding? Where is this field now???
@Ress - Hmm, that’s quite strange. It seems to work fine in our test environment, so something strange is definitely going on here. We’re looking into it now.
As Vera stated previously…
What happened to the lesson description box?
The old import lesson interface let you add a lesson description to the lesson and the new one does not!
So my statement above is not so wrong… The developer(s) never used the form to upload a single text with it. Let the users find the bugs…
Adding lessons is a real pain now especially if you want to add more than one lesson to a course.
I’ve found a new point. The message “Content has been created.” appears only for 3 seconds. Sometimes (especially when I upload mp3 files) I open a second tab. When I come back to LingQ it is not obvious (with on glance) if the lesson has been saved. It would be better it the message didn’t disappear like in older versions of LingQ.
Alex, April 11th: “Please give us a few more days to get this page sorted out - by early next week it should be working better!” Now another 10 days later I would like to summarize the main points of criticism that haven’t been resolved yet:
- Lesson description is missing
- The text box appears quite late. Sometimes I have to wait about a minute before it appears.
- The text box is too small now. The text is the most important thing in a lesson.
- “Add another lesson to this course” is missing. This is important if you want to import a bunch of lessons into one course.
- The position number is missing. I often fix it. Now I’ve to go back to the course overview to do this.
- Opening the other lessons of the course from the lesson import page is no longer possible.
- Checking which resources exist is now difficult because you have to check each kind and each language!
- Deleting from the lesson page is missing.
I have not read any of this thread yet, but I did import some stuff into a course yesterday for the first time since the import page was updated. Here are a couple of comments.
-
The page really misses the button to add a new lesson in the same course, which makes uploading lots of lessons difficult.
-
There is not enough contrast between the boxes for typing the title and lesson text. I can barely see the boxes.
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There is an option for “I don’t want a preview of this lesson to be shown outside the login.” I have absolutely no idea what this means. Maybe it’s important, but it is unclear.
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This last one is probably the most important of my comments. The box for entering the lesson text is tiny. It looks like I am looking at it through a keyhole. There seems to be a trend with the latest LingQ updates where the most important parts of the website/app are made as small and insignificant as possible.
@Colin: “There is an option for “I don’t want a preview of this lesson to be shown outside the login.” I have absolutely no idea what this means. Maybe it’s important, but it is unclear.”
If you choose this option only users who are logged in can see the lesson. Otherwise the lesson can be found by Google, iTunes etc… One problem is (or was, don’t know if something has changed here) that the lesson wasn’t counted as “taken” for the provider, if people listen to it via iTunes for example. So LingQ gave the opportuniy to opt out here.
@VeraI - I’m very sorry for the slow progress on this. We are still actively working on this but some things are taking longer than we originally expected, and a few periphery issues have popped up that slowed progress. Unfortunately this is kind of how things go in the development world, and nothing ever happens quite as quickly/easily as we would hope.
@all - Regarding the lesson description, this was something that we intentionally removed. The lesson description is something that we are phasing out. We didn’t want people to continue adding lesson descriptions, since they will no longer be shown at one point, so we decided to remove the lesson description box from the import page.
Regarding the other issues reported, I have noted these down and we’ll do our best to keep making progress here.
@Alex: You have removed the lesson description by purpose? Seriously? Do you know how much effort I’ve put in to make proper descriptions? In a lot of lessons with a picture the Flickr URL is included that is necessary regarding copyright and licence issues. By the way, that was the way that was recommended by LingQ. It was described in the help files too. A lot of LingQs own lessons (especially from the official LingQ podcasts) must been affected. In a lot of my private lessons I’ve added links in the lesson description. Are they now all lost?
Generally, I don’t use the import screen heavily and it works ok for me, however I would second the comment about the text box being too small. Being able to easily read and edit the lesson is important. It’s not uncommon for me to clean up a few erroneous word that I noticed after importing (I often use OCR to create texts). Even if it were a normal text control I could resize it with my browser but currently I am stuck with it as it is.
@VeraI - You’re right - we’ll add the description back and find a better way to deal with this. Perhaps displaying the description on the Info pane would be better, as it would give more prominence to the description that is mostly hidden now.
@neofight78 - We’ll release a small update soon that should help with this!
Great stuff! 
@Alex: “Perhaps displaying the description on the Info pane would be better …”
I think this is a good idea. I had this idea too before.
Yeah! A full size import window is back. Thanks.
How about an that “Import Lesson” API call? Then I can just make an “Upload this eBook / pdf” page and or some kind of batch uploader. Or… just do that.
What I’d really like to see – and this is low hanging fruit, I think – is a batch zip upload page
Upload a zip with:
Course.txt
1-LessonName.txt
1.mp3
2-LessonName.txt
2.mp3
Course.txt would have all the necessary course info, #LessonNum-LessonName.txt would have the lesson text, #LessonNum.mp3 is the audio (if any)
Zip it up, upload it, and call it a day. Uploading eBooks would be simple after that. Convert to text. Split into files… upload.
I have about 180 Star Trek episode transcripts and the mp3s that I’ll NEVER read on LingQ because it takes too damn long to do the one basic thing (ehh, wait that’s reading) SECOND best/basic this website should be good at – importing content quickly and painlessly.
Hello,
Thanks for making the lesson window bigger.
There seem however still to be two problems left for me:
I have to add an image to a lesson, even though the course has a standard one defined.
More annoying:
Once I re-save the lesson, the lesson number goes back to 0! (Initially it is now added correctly at the end).
Thanks,
Silvia
@spatterson - Thanks for the suggestion! I’m not sure this is a priority for us - the average user isn’t quite as well versed in technology as yourself so I don’t think this would really be used much. Though we’ll keep it in mind for a rainy day… 
@silviad - We’ll hopefully have both of these fixed soon!
I guess the average user would rather spend hours uploading an eBook on your site… than watch a youtube video or read a document explaining how to zip up some files? I think you’re wrong.
My god. Someone who creates lessons on a daily basis say something. Bulk upload? Or monkey around on the Import page for 2 hours?