I wonder who would be interested in a little friendly competition using Skritter and Twitter.

The idea would be to learn the largest possible number of characters in a certain period of time. We can use the existing Skritter tweets to track people's progress.

Here are some proposed rules. What do you think?

1. We're on the honor system here, so grade yourself strictly; if you got a dot wrong, mark it as 2, and if you got more than a dot wrong, mark it as 1.
2. Set up Twitter notifications and post your Twitter ID on this thread. We'll all follow each other and see how we're doing.
3. At the end of the period, we'll see who has learned the most characters and who has reviewed the most items. We'll name a winner and runner-up in each category.
4. Winners get bragging rights. We can make a web page that glorifies them.

One problem is that people get their tweets on different days. I would propose a rule that says that we will total your most recent N tweets that fall before the competition deadline. For example, we could announce a competition today (March 24th) with a deadline of midnight EDT April 1st. That should be enough time for everyone to tweet twice, so we would take the sum of the two tweets prior to the deadline.

Sound fair? Who's in?

James (jww1066 on Twitter)

Love to, but I don't use twitter.

And I'm focusing on words not characters :p.

Second problem with that is you could turn off twitter notifications and fake your tweet updates (: No way to tell.

@xkfowboa The Skritter gods could tell.

yes, would be better if it´s done by skritter,
i would suggest that the winner gets 1 free subscription month =)

I'd create a new account and 'learn' at least 1,500 characters within three days.

Addition:

The contest should instead focus on the time spent skrittering, taking into consideration that many users concentrate on new words, not new characters.
There are also fewer methods of faking that number.

@穆: Since the only reward is glory, it seems unlikely that someone would cheat using a different username. In your case, for example, we already know you as 穆 with the anime avatar, and presumably you would want the honor attached to that identity, no?

Looks like you would be likely to win the competition, by the way:

http://twitter.com/#search?q=learned%20%22on%20skritter%22%20%22now%20at%22

And all I can say here is DAMN:

http://twitter.com/mu_er/status/10530212328

As for time, there's no reason we can't also name a winner in the "time spent Skrittering" department. However, my understanding is that this number has a much bigger error bar because the timer counts time spent when the page is showing in a browser window/tab, not necessarily time spent studying.

@xkfowboa: I noticed that the Skritter tweets all say "via Skritter"; I'm not up on the Twitter API, but a brief read doesn't turn up a way to forge that, so I think it might be a little difficult to fake.

James

P.S. I also focus mostly on words, but until the Skritter gods add the words learned total to the tweets there's no way for us to track that.

This sounds fun, but twitter is blocked where I am in China. What about using screenshots of the Skritter stats page? a look at the graph could show characters learned. Besides, if there was any suspicion of cheating/photoshop the gods could check the stats.

You can set up twitter notifications? How...

Sounds fun to me! Though I have been a bit slow learning characters recently...

Ben (bplyons on Twitter)

You can manually adjust your tweet interval and start date to run in the same range for a competition, if you want. Have fun! (I'm @nwinter on Twitter, so you can compete with me, too.)

The Twitter settings are in the Progress Reminders area (from the bottom of the progress page):
http://www.skritter.com/progress

Sounds like more demand for leaderboards to me. ;)