Sudden drastic skill decay

[aspielman]

All my trees, which two hours ago were entirely gold up to the current study level, have just decayed drastically

• 39 skills decayed in French
• 24 skills decayed in German
• 20 skills decayed in Italian

I have been practising all of them every day for over a month to keep the trees gold and have never seen anything like this. Duolingo, please tell me what is going on: have your practice algorithms been changed? Could there be a glitch in my account? Please let this be a bad dream that is gone when I wake up tomorrow . . .

** update 10 mins later - 2 more German skills gone. And some of the German skills are definitely skills that I refreshed with complete untimed practice lessons earlier today.

** next morning 40 French, 28 German, 22 Italian: 90 skills!

[jm_lewis]

Me too. I had one decay and one lesson left in my entire tree as of this morning--I was going to knock those out tonight and celebrate. But now I have 18 new decayed skills to fix first!

[aspielman]

I also suspect a deeper problem as I looked for the first time at my French vocabulary list sorted by strength. I immediately noticed that some words ('journée', 'octobre' and others also) show as 1 bar when I am absolutely certain that I had those words and got the sentences right in practice exercises yesterday or at most the day before.

[jm_lewis]

After doing several of my decayed skills, it appears that the decays were addressing an actual problem. I've been seeing some words that I haven't seen since at all since they were introduced, and finding the practice sessions to be worthwhile. I'm guessing that the recently practiced words you're seeing are probably just a one-time byproduct of the update, where it seems that decays tend to be applied at a pretty coarse level.