Hi,

Many of the sample sentences are not showing up. I used to have a sample sentence come up along with the definition for nearly all my words, now they show only about 20% of the time.

Any ideas?

Is this on beta or www? We've made a bunch of changes on beta. I wouldn't think it would affect the live site, but now I'm wondering what's going on.

Second this. Tons of words for which I *know* I had example sentences now no longer show them; something is broken. I'm using the stable site, studying both simplified and traditional.

yes, and worst part is that there is no option to bring them back.

Nick: I have been in beta tester mode for a couple of months.

I have a specific example now.

The character 财富 just came up, and there was no sample sentence. There used to be a sample sentence that was something like: 你不要崇拜财富。

Hmm. This is how I'm testing:

http://beta.skritter.com/scratchpad?words=财富

With this, I still see "不要崇拜财富." come up. I'm guessing that you see the same thing when you visit that link, but that when you were studying normally on Study All, no sentence appeared? Was it a writing prompt, tone prompt, or both?

Most example sentences have disappeared for me too.

Same issue, it doesn't seem depend on if it's for the tone/writing/pinyin or meaning.

Perhaps this will help diagnose the problem. Skritter just added 淘氣 from the HSK 5 list. At the writing prompt, it shows no example sentence. I click the magnifying glass, it brings up the bubble for 淘氣; I click the pencil next to "Example Sentence," it says "There are no sentences for 淘氣!" But if from that same window, I click the single character 淘, it shows "我受不了淘氣的小孩" as a choice.

Here's the interesting part: I figured I would try to just add that sentence as an example for 淘氣. So I went back to the 淘氣 window, clicked "create a new sentence," copied the Chinese version into the Chinese box, realized that I didn't have the pinyin or the exact translation, and clicked "Cancel" and NEVER SAVED it. I then went back to the 淘 bubble to copy and paste the pinyin and translation into notepad to add them to 淘氣. But when I got back to 淘氣, magically that sentence (along with the complete pinyin and translation) appears as the only available example sentence. Can't imagine what would have caused this behavior.

Update: I tried to duplicate this with another sentence, 活潑的孩子有時是會淘氣的, which was also under 淘 but not 淘氣. Same thing; this sentence is now one of the two options for 淘氣。

But when I tried it a third time with 你揪猫尾巴,太淘气了, it didn't happen. When I tried adding all of the information for that sentence into the "create (pinyin, translation, then segmenting it and trying to save it), it gave an error, saying that sentence already exists. But it's still not a choice for 淘氣, just 淘。 (Maybe a simplified/traditional issue there, since that sentence has 淘气, not 淘氣).

Hope this helps diagnose what's going on so it can be fixed. I don't like adding new words without example sentences; I often misunderstand the nuances and then learn them wrong.

Second update. It is a simplified/traditional thing. And you don't have to go to the "add new sentence" window and click cancel to get it to become an option for 淘氣; what you have to do is hit the checkbox next to the sentence in the 淘 window to select that as one of your example choices for 淘. Once I checked the box next to 你揪貓尾巴,太淘氣瞭 on the example sentence popup for 淘, that sentence immediately became an option for 淘氣。 In light of this, you can probably ignore the previous stuff about attempting to add the sentence and hitting cancel afterwards; it's more likely I was hitting the check box at the same time I was copying and pasting the sentence, and it was checking the box that was causing the behavior and not the aborted attempts to add example sentences.

Hopefully final update. As I studied a few more minutes, it seems pervasive: example sentences are only showing up for single character words. Checking the box for the sentence on the single character's popup "reminds" Skritter that it is also a sentence for the multi-character word. Tried with 熊貓: no example sentence. Click 熊, click the box next to 熊貓很聰明, lo and behold, 熊貓很聰明 is now an example sentence for 熊貓。

Reading through the bug reports again and looking at what's going on with the indexing, it seems that everyone seeing missing sentences is probably seeing this on stable (not beta) except for 贺知宝. Y'all should wait until after the new sentence stuff goes up on the 15th and see how it is then.

I suppose if I make another snotty remark about breaking the "stable" version and fixing the "beta," the response will still be "In this case, we unfortunately had some backwards incompatibility in some of the new sentence stuff which did make problems for the stable site, but apart from this case, stable is actually more stable." See http://www.skritter.com/forum/topic?id=252877442.

:-p

Beta indexed the sentences one way, live indexed them another--whichever one edited the sentence last was the one that got to keep it!

The new indexing is live, though, so everything should be good to go again.