A quick question about totals of items to review. The front page no longer has totals of items to review, but instead tells me that I have "a lot" of items to review (100+). And the practice page just has progress bars above the Skritter pane. But the front page have been stuck saying this since the changes, and the progress bars at the top have not been, um, progressing... The mysteriousness of "a lot" is a bit dispiriting: the former system of having the number of items to review made it easier to get a sense of how much work there was to be done. Is "a lot" 150 items? 500? 1000? Would it be possible to reinstate the actual numbers?

It may be that I'm also experiencing a bit of catch-up after the retiring of the old HSK level 1 list; but at the moment without any sense of how much to be done, and with the front-page not changing from "a lot" despite hours of work, I'm feeling a bit of a 猴脑...

But, having said that, the speed of the all-new Skritter is magnificent!

I think the same, a LOT chars (espcially tone) to review everyday

To fetch all the items you have to review, the new system uses a new filter provided by Google App Engine recently, and it appears to be both too bugged and too slow to use. Because it's too slow, it errors out when there are more than about 100 items to return or count, maybe less, which is why we put that 'a lot' there when your item count gets high. And we only realized yesterday it may not even be returning things in the correct order, which would be why you keep practicing and practicing but never see the numbers go down (and why some people are seeing certain items way too often).

I'm going to replace that all in one filter with a bunch of smaller queries today, which hopefully will allow the numbering to go much higher and fix a lot of problems in terms of scheduling.

And by the way, Nick just put back the numbers in a tooltip over the progress bars on the practice page, so you can hover your mouse over them to see your current numbers.

Good to know it may not just be a problem with my monkey brain, Scott (those characters were coming up so often, that I was becoming a little paranoid...)

The tooltip is a nice touch. Thanks again for all your hard work.

Will

i dont know if its just a bug but i went out for lunch for three hours came back and it said you have 100+ items to review. is that normal? -x-

Love the speed, but I'm starting to feel like putting off practicing for a little while until some of the bugs are worked out, and I know you guys are working hard, so I'm sure it won't be long. I just don't know how many more times I can write 帮忙 before I go insane....

We just uploaded a patch that may have resolved some of this issue with this. It also has a count beyond 100 items of how much is ready to review. We may see some slower loading for the count and words for now, but hopefully you won't see too much slowdown until App Engine can fix the bug.

Since we're not sure the extent of this bug versus some other bugs we're working on, please give it a try and let us know what issues with scheduling you're still experiencing. I know that it's fixed the issue for my scheduling, at least. We've got one other fix coming up shortly that's causing words not to load, which unfortunately has been hitting several users.

Emily, I don't think that's normal (unless you were practicing and getting a lot of words wrong for a long time before that), but perhaps this fix will mitigate that sort of thing.

Nicki -- are you marking 帮忙 correct when you write it? This may be a separate issue, as it doesn't look like it's saving your review progress at all on that word (assuming you got it right last time).

hi guys, i'm seeing the number to practice (great) on the home page, but get a server error message when i got to "practice", then (sometimes) a suggestion to try reload. no luck.

regards

Would be cool if you could click on the review / add and see exactly what the reviewees / addees are.

The tooltip doesn't show the real number of items to review, but it does when I move to the home page.

In addition, Skritter give eccentric flavor when the 'Eccentric flavor' box is not ckecked.

Thanks in advance.

Nkdamtic, there is an issue affecting several users that causes that, but as far as I can tell, it shouldn't be affecting you (at least, not with your currently next scheduled three words). It's really giving you a "server error" message inside the Flash window? The patch for the issue we know about is coming tomorrow and may help, but it may be something else.

Ximeng, you can see what's up for review by going to the vocabulary tab and sorting by "next," but nothing yet to see what's been added. We currently don't track it, either. You can sort by "learned" on the vocabulary viewer, but that'll also include some that you've recently gotten wrong, which the kitten currently sets to "unlearned".

Jainun, my tooltip on the review bar is working okay -- what does yours say? 100+? I'm also seeing only the following messages without eccentric flavor:

"Correct!", "Perfect.", "Good job.", "Well done.", "Excellent!", "Great!"

So I'm not sure what's going on there -- try reloading the practice page after setting (and saving) the preference?

About 帮忙, I don't remember the exact number, but it seems it has come up 10-20 times in the last day or so. Feels way too often. Granted, I didn't get it right the first few times, so it should have come up again soon, but then I started getting it right. Over and over and...

It isn't saving that I got it right?

I promise I did!

Some others have come up perhaps a bit more frequently than I would expect, but perhaps it is related to my lists? I was studying HSK 1 and I know it had been disabled or redone or something. I am rather sad about that. I see today that it has disappeared from my practice page.

I want to re-add it. Have I lost all the progress I had made on that list?

Nicki, looks like the scheduling system takes too long to increase the time between studies of an item that has been wrong a few times. I know how to fix that though, and I increased the time between studies for that particular word for you. I'll get to fixing that today.

As for HSK 1, we only removed the characters only list. HSK 1 is still listed in the vocabulary lists page, and all the characters you added from the old list should still be around with the progress you already made on them.

Thanks so much!

Nuked it.

I could not find a way to remove all the radicals I had on my list so I decided to start over.

Things to improve:

A better way to manage, add and remove words.

Seams that I did too have a some words showing up several times even though I got them right like 10 times. Guess it is the same problem above.

Thanks, it s a nice peace o program, it can get very addictive.

Thanks mario!

We're working on a new system for the vocabulary list page right now, and hopefully will have it up in the next few days. This will include a better way to add and remove large swaths of words from lists. We removed the way to remove large chunks of the list because people were getting confused by it. Just a stop gap measure until we get our act together.

As for the words coming up repeatedly, were they words that you knew coming into Skritter? We just put in a fix so that words you always get right will get pushed forward faster because they were swamping some users. Were they a few words or were all words showing up too often? If you find going through a second time that there are more words coming up too often, then give us some examples of them and we can look into it and try to identify where the scheduling is going wrong.