Match The Memory – The Blog – MatchTheMemory.com is a fun game that lets you upload your own pictures into a Concentration-style game that you can share with friends and family.

Dumping Facebook and Twitter logins

Why We’re Removing Facebook and Twitter/X Login from Our Site

At Match the Memory, we believe in making choices that align with our values. That’s why we’ve decided to remove Facebook and Twitter/X as login options for our users. While these platforms were once useful for connecting people, their recent actions—especially those of their respective owners, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk—have led us to reconsider their role in our digital ecosystem.

1. Meta (Facebook) and Its Role in Political Manipulation & Censorship

Facebook (now Meta) has a long history of enabling misinformation, undermining election integrity, and cooperating with authoritarian regimes. Under Mark Zuckerberg’s leadership:

The platform has allowed political misinformation to flourish, scaling back election integrity efforts even after its role in events like the 2016 U.S. election and Brexit.
Facebook has allegedly complied with government requests to silence activists, particularly in authoritarian states.
Instead of prioritizing truth, Meta’s business model rewards sensationalism and political extremism, often at the expense of democracy.

2. Twitter/X Under Elon Musk: A Platform for Extremism and Political Bias

When Elon Musk took over Twitter (now X), he promised to improve free speech. Instead, his leadership has led to:

The reinstatement of far-right extremists and conspiracy theorists previously banned for inciting violence.
A clear political bias favoring right-wing and authoritarian-leaning figures while attacking progressive voices.
The dismantling of Twitter’s content moderation teams, allowing misinformation—especially about elections—to spread unchecked.

3. A Commitment to Ethical Platforms

Both Meta and X have chosen profits over principles, allowing their platforms to become tools of manipulation rather than spaces for meaningful discourse. We don’t want to contribute to that ecosystem by continuing to integrate with their services.

By removing Facebook and X login from our site, we’re taking a small but meaningful step toward supporting a more ethical digital landscape. We encourage our users to explore alternatives like privacy-conscious login methods and independent social platforms that prioritize user well-being over engagement-driven manipulation.

What’s next

If you currently have an account on Match the Memory that uses a Facebook or Twitter login, create a new account using one of our existing login providers. If you use the same email for both systems, you should be automatically logged in to your existing account. If you get a new account and need to manage the content in your old account, reach out via our contact form. Let us know which providers you’re moving to and from, what your email address is in both systems, and we’ll manually update your new login to point to your old account.

In the coming days, we plan to add social login experiences for newer providers that have become popular since we originally created the site. In the mean time, we thank you for your understanding and support as we work toward a better online experience for everyone.

A productive school year!

Since the start of the 2023-2024 school year, you guys have created some fantastic new games. Here are the most popular — way to go, team!

Rank	Title / Image	Creator
1	Ms. Luna’s Solar Eclipse Game	Ms. Luna
2	Ep Library Skills	Sarah Hubbard
3	Library Breakout 2023	Erica Morgan
4	Fast and Slow, Objects Go	Kaitlyn Bratcher
5	Spring Holidays & Celebrations Around the World	Ms. Luna
6	Pattern Matching Game	Ms. Swinton
7	Fall Things	Annie Reed
8	Personality Adjectives	Anna Ocampo
9	Mythvivor: Miskatonic University – All-Stars Memory	Coffee
10	0-10 Number Spanish	Veronica Shuguli

Fun spelling helpers

My kids’ school uses the McGraw-Hill Reading Wonders curriculum for spelling lists, and I made a few matching games last year for my 4th-grader to practice his spelling words. At the start of this school year, I decided to fill in the whole elementary school spelling spectrum. Here’s 180 matching games full of spelling words (30 x 6 = 180)!

I’m starting to detect a pattern

Most of the images that we originally built into Match The Memory fit with our original vision for the system — family-oriented sharing of one’s personal life. These images were mostly in the “scrapbooking” vein with color schemes that reflected the late 2000s.

Today, we’re announcing a refresh of the default images. The most popular images that launched with the site are sticking around, but we did some spring cleaning and got rid of many images that were rarely used.

In their place, we’re adding light and dark varieties of some basic patterns that work with whatever background color you’ve chosen. From bubbles to zig-zags, these patterns have lowered-opacity white and black colors to subtly brighten or darken your color palette.

Dark and light variations of the “Weave” pattern.

Check out all of the patterns below.

Thanks to Hero Patterns for providing the source images.

We speak your language

A few months ago, we posted about the new fonts we’d added to the site, and hinted that we had “plans to translate the site and editor itself into many languages.” We’re happy to announce that phase 1 of those plans has now launched on the site.

Under the hood, every time your web browser asks a web site to load a specific page, it also tells that web site which languages it supports. “I read Korean,” it may say, “can you show me this page in that language?”; or, “Please give me a version of the web site that’s tailored to Spanish as spoken in Argentina, or any Spanish whatsoever.” Up until a few weeks ago, that specific part of the request (called the Accepts-Language header) was ignored by Match The Memory. “Koh-ree-uhn? Sorry, never heard of it — you get English.” “Here ya go, a nice English web page for you!”

We have now published a little tweak that allows the site to correctly respond to those requests for the 5 most-requested languages on Match The Memory:

English
Spanish
Portuguese
Dutch
Korean

Everything from the home page, to the game play page, to the editor where you can create and refine your own personalized matching games has been professionally translated into these languages. The addition of the four new languages gets us to almost 90% support for requests to our site, so it should open up opportunities for game creators and players across the world.

What’s next?

We’re planning to roll out translations for the following languages in the next few months:

Croatian
Polish
Italian
Hebrew
Russian
Chinese

(Update 2021-11-13: These languages have been added to the site!)

These represent the six next most-frequently requested languages on Match The Memory, and once they’re in place, more than 95% of our visitors will get the site sent to them in the language that they actually asked for.

After that, we’re going to branch out beyond the current user base of Match The Memory, and add support based on the most popular languages spoken worldwide. (Sorry, we don’t have plans to support fictional languages like Klingon.) That will involve creating translations for:

Hindi
Arabic
Malay
Bengali
French

If you’d like to speed up this translation effort so that we get to your chosen language more quickly, get in touch with us via our contact form. Let us know which language you’d be able to help with, and we’ll work together to drop its support into the site.

Alternately, if you’d like your preferred language to jump the line, as it were, you can donate the cost of the professional translation (approximately USD $30 per language) and let us know which one you’re interested in.

More fonts, more languages

When we originally conceived of Match The Memory more than 10 years ago, we had no idea that creators from all over the world would eventually make games in hundreds of languages using dozens of writing systems. As such, we picked fonts that we thought were fun at the time, not considering localization support in the slightest.

In the mean time, a lot has changed on the web in general, and specifically on the site, and it’s time that the typefaces available to game creators on Match The Memory reflect those changes as well.

Let’s hit the books together!

Over the years, teachers and students have been some of the most prolific visitors to Match The Memory. Educators all over the world create games for their students to review the fundamental concepts that they teach in their classrooms, in dozens of languages.

It goes without saying that we’re living in unprecedented times in many aspects of our lives, and education is no exception. With the current coronavirus restrictions on schools, and the corresponding shift to digital-first learning, many more people have learned about and started using the site. In March and April of 2020, our numbers of new users, games, and game plays have basically tripled from the same timeframe last year. We welcome all of our new game creators and players! We’re here to assist you in navigating these uncharted waters.

Happy 10th Birthday, Match The Memory!

The first version of Match The Memory launched exactly 10 years ago today. Since then, you’ve made thousands and thousands of memory games (25,000+!), which have been played more than 12 million times. Today, we’re celebrating not just the site itself, but the creators who made the best games on the site.

Creator control

Since nearly the beginning of Match The Memory, the person who plays the game has had a lot of control when it comes to the number of cards with which to play the game. The card count feature allows a player to select any number of cards, as I explained in a previous blog entry:

By default, when you come to play one of our memory games, you get all of that game’s cards. But at any point in the game play, you can decide to use fewer cards. Just use the “# of Cards” dropdown and select a lower number. Boom, you’re playing a much easier version of the game.

This can be somewhat problematic, for a couple of reasons. First, the player has to know to switch the dropdown. Some games (like the periodic table matching games that we created) contain a huge number of cards, which isn’t a great experience for the people trying to match those cards. Sure, a teacher could link to the version of the game that contains an appropriate number of cards, but not a lot of people know that trick.

How Match The Memory is better than a physical memory game

I have a lot of experience playing matching games, since I create quite a few myself, and I curate all of the public games built by others on the site. So when my 3-year-old son got an old-school physical matching game for Christmas this year, I immediately started contrasting the experience with playing a similar game online with Match The Memory.