The vast majority of my mnemonics are so quirky, personal, and bizarre, that I seriously doubt they can be of any use for others.
Unfortunately, I frequently find that I have shared a mnemonic accidentally because I forgot to deselect "shared".
I think that having to actively choose to share would be a better option. It would prevent the clutter of mnemonics too-personal to be useful for others, and perhaps it would encourage people to think more carefully about what might be useful for others.

What does anyone else think?

I guess that for many of those unshared mnemonics sharing is much more useful than most users think. Don't understate the usefulness of "stupid" mnemonics.

So please don't deactivate sharing as the default mode. Instead, I think it should be made easier to vote for mnemonics and individually deselect them.

I'm with you, Bart. There are only a few shared mnemonics which work for me. I don't share mine because they are useless for other people. I'd prefer to see just my own ones, and only if I ask to show them.

bart, the 'shared' box should remember the last state it was in. So if previously you haven't been sharing anything, next time you enter a new mnemonic it shouldn't share as default. However, equally, it will remember individual settings for individual mnemonics. If you choose to share just one, for example, that one will always have a ticked shared box, regardless of anything else.

If there is a problem, it's not with this, but with how to display stuff by default or not.

Byzanti, your right. For some reason I thought it 'forgot' when I had cleansed my laptop with c-cleaner or done something similar, but I just tried and it still remembers. Not sure quite how I ended up sharing so many mnemonics accidentally, unless there is something esle I do that wipes the record of its previous state.

Maybe not a problem then, my bad!

If I'm not mistaken, your shared mnemonics use the method from Tuttle's Learning Chinese Characters, right? If so, there are probably others who would appreciate using your mnemonics, since they're based on a system from a relatively popular book, so you might want to consider continuing to share them.

胖龙，I've used a combination of Tuttle method for pronunciation and Heisig for characters, with some of my own stuff thrown in.
I seriously doubt that most of it could be useful to others - Heisig doesn't tell you what every character is, so in building new characters I will often use images not known to other Heisig users. As for Tuttle, although I've used the fairy/giant etc for the tones, I often remember phonetics by building in a keyword which captures one usage of a different character with the same/similar pinyin (minus tone).
I think there are too many variables in here for other people to find most of them very useful...

One thing it would be great to have, although clearly not a priority, is the ability to tag mnemonics with Heisig, Tuttle, EZChinesey, strictly radicals or whatever. That way, people using a particular system could choose to view appropriate mnemonics.

I am hoping that a combination of more mnemonics and ratings will eventually saturate the public mnemonics list for each character with stuff ordered by usefulness to most people. It'll take a while, though. Anyway, with the default mnemonic filter, I wouldn't worry about sharing stuff that may not be useful--if it's not, then no one will pick it, and no big deal.

I vote, "share." Besides, our parents always told us to share. Sharing is nice.

I haven't actually seen any other users mnemonics yet. Is it turned on for everyone now?

I turned it so you can only see ones that have gotten 3 points by default; the rest you have to go clicking for. Now to pull out the indicator that shows when there are public mnemonics available...

Okay, I'm trying something subtle here for now. The "add char mnemonic (2)" will indicate that there are 2 shared mnemonics that you can get when you click to edit and click the "see all (2)" button. Let me know if it made sense when you saw it.

Yeah, I thought that was pretty clear as soon as I saw it. Nice!

Thinking about this month's competition, is there a way to see how many mnemonics we've added, and which ones are the most popular?

James

Much better now, thanks. I found it very confusing the other way.

Ah, that's good!

There isn't a page to see all your mnemonics yet, but there probably should be. It would be similar the starred words page. I don't think it would show you which are most popular--that would be slow to fetch.

Not sure when we can get that built, though. Probably have to do this competition without.