After using Skritter for about a month I have a few suggestions. I figured one big post would be better than a bunch of separate ones.

First, a "bury" option. In Anki, I can flip through the deck looking for the cards I want to review without affecting my study progress. This is nice if I'm tired, say, and want to study some of the easier writings, or if I'm cramming for a test and don't want to bother with the cards that won't be on it.

Second, it would be nice to be able to reset a card, or reset one of its parts. In my case, I stopped studying the definitions from one list, but the only way to prevent the definitions I've already studied from coming up again is to ban the definitions for those words. It'd be cleaner if I could just reset their definition cards.

Third, I've noticed that the software sometimes seems to set the default answer button to 2 (as opposed to 3) if you make a couple of stroke errors, but not always. I like it when it does.

Fourth, more community features - such as profile pages or an (optional) way to contact other users - would be nice.

Fifth, I've found that new cards tend to come up more often than I need them to. This probably varies between users depending on study method, so maybe an option to set the multiplier that occurs when you press "4" would help? I've also thought that allowing retention options lower than 80% might be good (not sure about that though).

Finally, http://chinese-characters.org/ is a good resource for etymologies and could be added to the lookup list, if you can figure out how to link to them.

Hope some of these are helpful.

Also, regarding #2, the ability to ban _parts_ of multiple words would be helpful as well.

As for #1, have you tried out the scratchpad? I think it's exactly what you're looking for.

Thanks, I'll have to try that for tests. But it's not quite what I was envisioning, which is the ability to study only certain cards while still tracking their progress. I guess you could do that by creating a new list of the cards you want and studying only that list, but I'm still a fan of the "bury" option because it's so easy - you just go through your reps and ignore the ones you don't want at the moment. (Not out of laziness though! I'll do the buried ones later, I swear!)

Hey ExAequali, thanks for the suggestions!

#1: Is that what "bury" does? I have been misunderstanding it this whole time. I don't think we will implement that--it's not an easy feature given how Skritter looks for the next words to review, and it seems pretty niche if no one has asked for it until now.

If you do want to skip past some items because you don't want to review them at the moment, you could mark them so-so. It will affect your stats, but it'll get them out of the way while keeping them at a similar interval to what they were before.

#2: You can remove the list from My Words and re-add it, and Skritter won't add back the definitions it had previously added before you turned off definitions for that list.

#3: The iOS app almost always will hit "so-so" before "forgot" as you make more mistakes, but the threshold depends on how many strokes are in the character, and there are different penalties for missing strokes vs. triggering a hint stroke to appear.

#4: I just talked with Scott and we've enabled a Skritter user-to-user messaging feature on beta, which doesn't reveal your email address unless you respond. If you don't want other users to be able to message you, you can set your account to private. To find it, click on the user's public profile (like from a forum thread) and then look for the new "Message" tab.

#5: It takes quite a while for your retention rate scheduling factors to catch up to how awesome you are and how you might have changed your retention rate. Give it some time and see if it learns that you don't need the new items reviewed that often.

#6: Sure, I'll add this one to my to-do list.

Hey Nick, thanks for the reply! Nothing better than responsive customer service. For #1, "so-so" will work well enough. Will do what you suggested for #2 and #5 as well.

Re #3, maybe I was noticing it with on Android and not on the website. Any reason for this feature not to be on the web version?

Appreciate the addition of #4. A further improvement would be expanding the popup profiles into full pages. I like how Duolingo does it - they also allow you to "follow" other users' progress and updates. Obviously this stuff is hardly crucial but community can be good for motivation.

For #6, I noticed that chinese-characters.org uses the UTF code for each character as its URL. I would think it shouldn't be too hard to add & link by UTF codes, seeing as you guys have managed to link to Zhongwen.com, whose URL system is completely opaque to me.

Also, a couple more things I've noticed. One, on Heisig mode it would good if the alternate definitions showed up on the main study page, especially for the character parts (since those definitions are often the ones used as part of Heisig's mnemonics).

Second, speaking of mnemonics, being able to change whether or not multiple mnemonics are shared from the "Your Mnemonics" page would be cool. (you could add a "share" and an "unshare" button)

Oh, and finally, for this forum itself, a "follow new posts by email" option when you make a post would be useful.

Edit: Wait, is this already implemented?

And yet one more suggestion: With phrases like 形形色色, it seems pointless to quiz the same character twice in a row when studying writing. The same for duplicated words like 爸爸, etc.

I personally can't address all of your suggestions, but here's what I have to toss in.

You can click the upper right hand corner of the forum post's page, named "Email replies to me" to get updates, yep!

Japanese has a 繰り返し symbol for the case when kanji repeats, which looks like this: 々. So instead of 様様, you can write 様々, or instead of 騒騒しい, you can write 騒々しい. Does Chinese have the same?

Interesting. Not that I know of!

Actually, Chinese does have that same symbol, I believe it's called the 重复号, or something like that. My teacher used it in class the other day and none of us knew it, so she had to explain it. I didn't know Skritter would recognize it though!

For item #5, the critical item is what grade you give the very FIRST time you see the character.
If you mark 1, it will come back in 5 minutes
If you mark 2, it will be back in about 12 hours
3 in 2 days, and I forget what it is for 4.

After that, it will (mostly) follow the regular timing, but there is a special formula if you always mark it correct ("so-so" or better), it will multiply the "expected" scheduled time by 1.5.
So if you mark "so-so" 2 times, after the 2nd time, you'll have to wait 16 hours to see again (12 hours * 0.9 (so-so factor) * 1.5).
If you mark it "correct" 2 times, you could wait a week or 2 to see it again.
See the nitty-gritty of this at http://www.skritter.com/api/v0/docs/scheduling

I created chinese-characters.org, and I appreciate ExAequali's recommendation above to add my site to your list of resources.

In case the site's structure isn't easy to implement, you can also use this style of link:
chinese-characters.org/cgi-bin/lookup.cgi?characterInput=字

I hope this helps. I also welcome any recommendations that would make my site more helpful to your users. Feel free to leave a comment at http://chinese-characters.org/discussion/?p=10025