Are you also notifying those in classrooms by some other method? If someone's lost access to Discussion they won't be able to see this post unless they try looking while signed out or on an account not in a classroom, which it's unlikely the majority will do.

I have to rant about this change and unprofessional handling of these sort of changes in general.

Well, I had myself in the classroom that I've created (to tract my own progress in more detail) and all off a suddenly I lost access to forum and guess what! I did not see this announcement and I have no way to see it. I could see the threads when I was logged off but logging in to the site it gives a generic error page.

1) Such changes should be announced in advance, not the moment the change is made. I would suggest at least a week. People go on vacations or they get busy so they do not monitor changes daily.

2) Instead of a generic error page Duolingo needs to create a redirect page explaining that forum access is blocked by X Class Teacher. This alone would remove a lot of frustration and support requests.

3) If you are cutting access to the forums please do not only announce on the forums. Could you start A page of official announcements (not part of forums) to the changes done to Duolingo that affects the operations .

4) Consider sending an email to users. At least for classrooms stuff you can send email to classroom owners.

5) Also consider giving teachers the capability to give students access to sentence discussions. Because after the forum access is cut-off sentence discussions are also blocked and students can learn a lot from those discussions. The teacher should have the capability of blocking forum access in general or limit to just sentence discussions. Maybe even have the capability to allow read-only access.

6) Yesterday, the only thing I could do was submit the issue via the form on the site and as always it seems to have gone to bit bucket. No answer as always besides the auto generated reply. Absolutely frustrating!

Please respond to these support inquiries submitted via the form.

Believe me if Duolingo had done 2, 3 or 4 above you would probably not get many inquiries for support. The key is communicating appropriately and Duolingo could do much better in this! This is especially important if you are going to offer pay options.

So, I've just lucked on my own intuition as a software engineer regarding the change. I was still getting email updates on the threads I was participating and the threads were accessible when I was logged off so it just occurred to me that maybe there was a change in classroom settings. I expected the forum access would be managed via student administration button and could not find it there and I took myself from the classes I had put myself in and the forum access is back now.

I really want this site to succeed and not fall on its own wait. Doing 2 or 3 does not really cost Duolingo at all and would prevent a lot of agony in the future.

This is a good update. This is a sort-of verification for the forums, that only applies to students in a classroom. I'd like to see more verification, some form of email verification. Maybe that would stop or at least help stop dedicated trolls and spammers. I realize this has been requested a lot, but I think it's something Duolingo should really consider. On the other hand, though, I don't think there's been a lot of major spamming/trolling recently (it seems to come in spurts), but why not stop it before it begins? Keep up the good work :D

What a major mistake, It took me a few days to unlock discussions as there was no indication what happened.

It looked like the discussion part of the website was shutdown. the links to it have been completely stripped from the site. One link was left behind in the stories section of the labs. It failed to load with error message. took me a while to figure out how to change the setting.

UPDATE: You are correct that this should have been announced in advance. The change affecting all old users was unexpected. We have made sure our FAQ updates section has a warning, and now have a custom error page that explain to the user that their Discussions have been disabled. Hopefully this should help people who are still stuck without forums. Thanks for all your suggestions, together we make a better virtual place <3

Thanks for this update. I am not part of a classroom, but I have seen people confused about that. Thank you vivisaurus!

It didn't work for me. I have to use my Korean account to comment. I deleted my classes, but it still won't work.

I love Duolingo and I recommend it to all of my ESL students but this kind of heavy handed action on the part of the people running the app is very disappointing. Duolingo is successful because of a good system and because of loyal users. Don't alienate your users by treating them with this kind of "you don't need to know" attitude. If you make a huge change that affects users make sure you tell them instead of forcing them to dig around on the Internet trying to find out what is going on. There are many options you could have chosen for actually taking the user's experience into consideration here - an email, a notification on the main page of the app, a warning on the individual sentence bar with the flag and (for some unwitting users now mysteriously missing) discussion bubble, etc.

Would it be possible to post an announcement about this change to Twitter or Facebook? It took me several days to figure out why discussions had disappeared.

@staff, strange behaviour with Privacy settings: not the same depending on the page rom which I access them.

Steps to reproduce:

1. Go to schools.duolingo.com and access Privacy settings.
   => You can edit and save them. And it takes effects.
2. Go to the "classroom_populator" page of one of your classroom ("schools.duolingo.com/classroom_populator/XXXX" where XXXX is the Id of your classroom) and access Privacy settings.
   => The 4 settings are on "disabled" (checkboxes all on "false"). you can check the checkboxes but the "save" button does nothing.

EDIT (1min later):

Note that changing settings from https://schools.duolingo.com/classroom/xxxx/settings (as mentioned in the Support Pages) works fine.

As a teacher...I can see it. When I enter my classroom as one of the students, I'm suddenly forbidden to join the discussions...That's how I discovered the change. I went straight to settings and enabled me as a student to join this discussion!

Your team at Duolingo does great work and provides an awesome public service. I'm a huge fan. I defend you in response to any unfair or unreasonable criticism I see in public forums. With that said...

I hereby present you with my Incredibly Bad Planning Award.

It would have been really, really, really helpful to have provided notification to your users that they might be about to lose access to the notification mechanism. Before they lost it.

Thanks, I'll let you get back to your normally very well run operations now.

For anyone else with this problem who is not using duolingo schools the following might be helpful. I finally figured out that it was somehow counting one of my friends as a "student", perhaps because they invited me to a club on the android app. Because there was no classroom I couldn't change the privacy settings but unfollowing the friend resolved the issue for me.

Ha! I was in my own classroom, to check it out, so i got automatically locked out of discussions so could not see this damned post or instructions or be directed to them by anybody, three days in the wilderness. How stupid is that? Eventually i did some googling, and thought about the error message i was getting today ( but not previously) and decided classrooms was the probable problem - so I left my own class to see if that would help, nope, had to shut everything down and try to come in via duolingo for schools and hope this would jog the sytem into treating me like an adult again now I was no longer part of any classroom. Usual crap implementation duo - really outdoing yourselves as usual.

Are your discussions or events tabs gone? Check your Duolingo for Schools' settings.

Hi vivisaurus, don't you mean your www.duolingo.com's "Progress Sharing" settings instead of your Duolingo for Schools' settings.?

Indeed,

• the students of classrooms may have their discussions or events tabs gone but students have no access to the Duolingo for Schools' settings of the classrooms they're student of.
  On the other hand, they do have access to their www.duolingo.com's "Progress Sharing" settings instead of your Duolingo for Schools' settings. from where they can fix the "no discussion" issue.
• the educator/teachers have access to the Duolingo for Schools' settings of the classrooms they created but it'll not have them having their discussions or events tabs gone(*)

(*) Except if they are a student of their own classroom and their Privacy settings disables the discussions.

Update: it's tiny, but we are now putting the discussion link back up on the blue bar for all users, so everyone should be able to reach the error page. Moving this discussion temporarily to the Educator's forum in case some teachers still are now aware. Thanks for sharing your concerns all!

Ugh. My teacher isn't even allowed to touch the settings, but discussions is super helpful. This sucks.

What do I do if I haven't got a classroom and don't want to join one? I cannot change my settings to enable discussion then! I'm not a student and I cannot access the discussions. Could someone help please?

It works for me now: I can see the discussions. The only thing not working for me is that I cannot send friend-invitations or write to my friends...