Hi!
I dont want to be that person who always nags and complains (a bitch), but there are a few things that I feel that I need to get off my chest.

I have been skrittering for a about 8 months now, and I think that skritter is a good tool (not great) to help with Chinese learning. From now and then I have been reading on the forums, and there have been a lot of feature requests.
Some of them doesn't really make any sense and should be (and have been) ignored, but there are a great deal of key features that still needs to be added.

A lot of these feature suggestions were posted on these forums even before I registered as a user, and the admins responded with the usual "I will add it to my todo list". It's sad though, that after almost a year of time, almost none of these features have been added, and that makes me kind of lose faith in the "skritter administration".

Even some extremely basic features like writing your own example sentences still haven't been implemented after years of waiting.

The "up for review" word number is still bugged and has never really worked.

The editing of "my words" is still extremely impractical, and you can still only view 15 words at a time...of the 10k words in "my words".

These are just 3 examples from the plethora of problems and bugs that currently exist.

If skritter was a free service, then I would not complain, but it ain't, and therefore I feel that I can demand better service.

We need to know what is being updated.

When need to know when its being updated.

We need to know that something is actually happening and that problems are being taken cared of!

I mean, skritter has the potential of being OMFG SUPER MEGA "U HAVE TO HAVE IT" IMBA GREAT!!!, but it's not just gonna happen by it self.

I know, and I am very sure that Im not alone, that I would easily pay 2 times or even 3 times the fee for skritter, if the service was up to par.

Thank you!

I like a lot of the new features that were implemented after I joined (mnemonics, character decompositions, that magnifying glass popup box). But when it comes right down to it, the features I like and the features you want are mostly fluff. Skritter is still excellent for its core mission: intelligent timing for "interactive" flashcards.

To be honest, I'm more worried that new features will interfere with the Skritter that I'm used to.

Of course some things need improvements, and no doubt each person has their gripes (my personal one is that some bits like adding vocab needs to be simpler, more user friendly -- I think it's quite intimidating for newbies atm), but I think you're painting a much much darker picture than it actually is.

I also think that they have been adding a lot, as Dependable Skeleton says. There's only two of them doing programming for the most part Scott (website, behind the scene, database parts), Nick (flash, actionscript, iphone app and all). I think they've done a very good job considering. Perhaps a "what we're working on now/will be working on" page would help?

One thing I want to nitpick is:

"Even some extremely basic features like writing your own example sentences still haven't been implemented after years of waiting. "

You have been able to write your own example sentences for a very long time! Definitions are editable, so you're free to have anything you want there. Start a new line there and insert your sentence! It's what I've done. You can also add pictures too.

I guess our expectations simply are different.

@Skeleton

Well, I feel that the features u mentioned are great for beginners and intermediate students, but they dont really do much for the advanced student. I don't think I've ever during these 8 months have used the magnifying glass. Why? Because it's time consuming and it kind of breaks the "study rhythm" having to click on something and then having to wait for a new window to pop up. I wish that there was some way though to configure what information that are shown on the actual "studying page". For example, the character decompositions are kind of useless to me, and I would easily want the difficulty of the word/character shown in its place.

I know that skritter is a good tool "in its core", but I feel that the lack of customizability is what makes it only a "good" tool and not a "great" tool.

@Byzanti

Sure, there are ways to make up for and do work-a-rounds for the lack of some features, but I feel that the fact that users actually have to do these work-a-rounds, simply just proves the point that there is an important feature missing.

I suggested a "what we are working on atm" page about 6 months ago, and its on their "to do list" so maybe we will have one next year or so.

Would any of these extra features really make someone learn chinese that much faster, or lack of them cause them to learn slower?
Whenever we get worked up about an issue on the site, if we think about it long enough, we can just calm down and chalk it up to a little OCD. But I don't think most people should even spend the time worrying because they should be learning chinese with the exceptional program they are subscribing to.

How is putting a sentence under the definition a work around? That's what custom definitions are for. Customising the prompt.

As for the page thing, while it may be a good idea -- did they actually agree to it?

I know it may seem easy to simply write a few lines of code and have those things implemented. But reality can sometimes be a real kick in the pants. A lot of work is being done on Skritter every day that you just don't see. For example, the removal of the queue definitely took months maybe even a year(s) or so to do. Then look at what happened afterwords, lots of work still needed to be done to fix new bugs that the changes created. Then their is the iPhone app. It is going to work offline. That means creating a whole new version of Skritter in a different programming language from scratch and then creating a new way for it to sync with the old system. Then there are the everyday bugs like stroke order, stroke recognition, adding new defintions and Kanji to the database. Those changes happen gradually but trust me it is much better than what it used to be. Adding user created example sentences is taking a while because the Skritter team is also working on the code that will sync up Japanese example sentences from Tatoeba. Skritter is a small company with only a few programmers and web developers; the management actually does real work and pulls their own weight. Because they're not the size of Microsoft or Google they have to prioritize what they work on. The Skritter team always reads and responds to E-mails and forum posts. Trust me the they're not ignoring us they just haven't gotten to those issues *yet*.

I agree with ddapore99. I think the Skritter team is doing a great job and i have never seen any company with such quick and good customer service. I have never doubted that the guys work extremely hard to improve Skritter. So if some of the issues/items that we users ask are not yet there i am sure there are good reasons for it. And bottomline, we have a great tool to learn to write characters, 5 yrs ago people had to learn Chinese without it. Personally if i would have to deal with thousands of flashcards i would have given up by now.

That's a pretty harsh critique for what is essentially a company run by less than a handful of people. This isn't Google, Skritter doesn't have hundreds of employees working on perfecting one feature. If you think Skritter isn't implementing the changes that need to be done I challenge you to create your own company and do it better. If you can do it better, you'll get the customers. However, as most of us are likely to find, it would probably take us weeks just to learn the basic coding behind a site like this - it really is a lot of hard work and the Skritter team deserves a lot of credit.

+1 in support of the skritter team.

Some features might be missing but I surely have improved my Chinese hugely once starting to use it.

The one thing I have been going on and on about for a long time it to make skritter more portable, i.e. to bring it to iOS but I know that Nick is working on it for sure...

+1 also. They have always and I mean ALWAYS responded promptly to my individual concerns or bug reports. No company on earth has ever given me this level of customer support.

On the other hand, I still badly want to be able to tell Skritter that I got the tones wrong for 马虎 even when I was only asked to write it, because inexplicably, I was able to write it but not say it.

Also, Byzanti, I understand that you're defending the team against an attack here, but an appropriate definition for "dog" is not "I feed table scraps to my dog regularly." It would be nice to have a sample sentence slot somewhere, eventually, and yes, putting it in the definition space is indeed a workaround. Personally, until that area shows up, consider using the often if not always ignored mnemonic area.

I've learned a ton of stuff, and everything I've learned I've been helped through by Skritter. Best ten bucks a month I've ever spent!

I think I fall in the category of being more concerned about Skritter evolving too much. Of course I can always disable things, but I remember when I first started and it was heavily focused on writing. If you look at my totals you can see how much extra practice I used to get on writing.

Character writings: 74884
Character definitions: 14238

Of course I added definitions later, but the difference is quite significant. Thinking back on it my writing was much better at that time, though now I feel a bit more balanced. My point is Skritter has evolved and certainly has distanced itself from what I feel was its initial goal of helping to improve writing. It's still there, but feels much less important than it did.

I realize the list system has evolved to give the user more control, but I always felt it was mostly created to add control over the queue. However, now the simple concept of the queue has broken into three lists; misc, bookmarklet and old queue. Really a bit confusing to me as all I really felt we needed was the ability to pause the old queue feature, it didn't really even need to be a list at all.

While changes are nice, I feel wishing for too many isn't really in the best interest either.

Well, I´m been around the same 8 months as DaXia and for now I have not felt a need for example to edit My Words. I´ve been a bit worried about too many features, but I´m happy with the new popup.

Nobody has commented the fee: I pay my 7 euros "con gusto" for the good service, but I would quit for the double.

Thanks guys, we really appreciate your understanding! We wish we could move at a faster pace, but as you all mentioned we have a lot of things on our plate, and we have to juggle these priorities as best we can. You guys basically have already gone over all the reasons things take a while to get done.

I do have one question though DaXia, I'm not exactly sure what it is you need for editing My Words? The My Words page is not built for easily sifting through absolutely everything you're studying, just the things you've studied recently and will soon study. For browsing in a more general fashion the list system is built for that, since it organizes what you're studying rather than having everything in a big pile. What is it exactly that you want to do that you can't do now? The other issues you mentioned I know about but I don't recall this one.

For our to do list, I can say that on my immediate plate is to wrap up the list system, tweaking it and fixing lingering bugs that have surfaced. Other upcoming things are:

- suspending accounts
- editing published lists
- update ChinesePod API to the latest version
- leaderboards and badges
- example sentences w/Tatoeba
- a whole lot of smaller updates and fixes

These are all medium-to-large projects, except for suspending accounts which shouldn't take long. Nick's focus right now and for a while longer is the iOS app so don't expect too much new from him for a while, except for occasional updates on how far along the app is.

The only problem is that this is what the to do list looks like right now. But things are constantly coming up that might bump the others down. I paused work on the new list system earlier this year to work on organizing a group of volunteers (who are awesome!) to hack away at our various dictionaries, and that came up rather suddenly. George will soon be UX testing our current interface, and in all likelihood he'll find some things that we really ought to fix. Just yesterday someone submitted a video to us of someone unfamiliar going through the demo, and now that I've seen so many ways it could be improved, I kind of want to focus on that because the demo, which newcomers use, is one of those things we really need to have be super good. And we're hearing a steady rising chorus of people asking for a dedicated Android app...

So we can tell you where we're going. But we can't really tell you where we'll be, because we don't know. Our to do list is very much dynamic. The best way to see what kind of activity is going on is to check our newsletter, and keep an eye on the blog. And remember, that's just the surface stuff!

DaXia:
" I don't think I've ever during these 8 months have used the magnifying glass. Why? Because it's time consuming and it kind of breaks the "study rhythm" having to click on something and then having to wait for a new window to pop up. I wish that there was some way though to configure what information that are shown on the actual "studying page"."

I totally agree with you in this point.
Maybe it's better to be able to customize the study screen. E.g. by adding some sections from the magnifying glass.

@Scott
Maybe you can conduct an survey with the question: "Would you pay an extra x $ so we can employ an additional developer?".

Wow, looks like I really stirred up a hornet's nest here, but that kind of was my intention.
I understand how my critique may seem harsh, but this is just how I feel. Personally, I like to be able to customize things because that gives me more control over my studies, but I can understand that there are also people who wants the exact opposite, and that there is no solution that will make everyone happy.
However, I feel that threads like this are important because it gives people a chance to truly speak their minds, thus making it easier for the skritter crew to understand how the users feel about skritter.

I kinda felt similar to how DaXia for a while but it's easy to look at the negatives and not focus on the positives. There are def. some thing about Skritter that I would change/don't like etc. but the overall score would have to be 9/10 :P The fact remains that Skritter has helped with my Chinese immensely and my Chinese would be a lot worse without it.

@Phoboss: Regarding customizing the prompt, we'd rather work on making the prompt as good for everyone as possible. Given its complexity it's not a simple process to set it up to be customizable, and it's best to just have it really good by default. Also, we are planning on trying to add more of this info in the next redesign. See Nick's post here:

http://www.skritter.com/forum/topic?id=114468661&comments=1

As for increasing the price to employ another developer, that's probably not the best way to go about increasing revenue, based on our own research. If we continue to grow and things keep up, we may be able to expand eventually but not for the time being at least. But for the time being, we'll do the best we can with what we have!

Sorry, not really on topic, but in response to your earlier post, Scott, this is the first I've heard of a "a steady rising chorus of people asking for a dedicated Android app." Please let me join that chorus. I sing baritone.

Now that I've been suckered into getting a smartphone, let me just say...

la la la la laaaaa...

@Scott
I understand your point.
Thanks for the clarification!
+1 for support!

I'm grateful to the Skritter team for the work they have done to provide this service, which has helped me out quite a lot with my early steps in Chinese.

My current issue is not so much that I can fault Skritter for what it is, as that I'm not so sure anymore that I =need= this service when I can practice my Chinese tradition/simplified and Japanese variant kanji all-together on Anki, on my iPhone, for free. There are surely things offered with Skritter that are not on offer with something like Anki, but I'm a pretty minimalistic user, I just want to learn the basic keywords and strokes for as many characters as possible.

Last night I set up an Anki deck that now has 7000 characters in it, basically every character you are likely to meet in Chinese or Japanese plus a good bunch more. On the front I have some keywords, on the back, the character itself. I practice with a simple pen and paper, which is faster than writing with a digital pen. I'm giving myself a month to stick with skritter while I try out the new system (I've burnt myself before switching too hastily from one thing to the next) but as the format is basically the same, except more convenient, and free, I just don't think at this point that I am going to be a customer for much longer.

I'm not saying this in order to make some kind of threat of complaint at the developers, whom I admire, to do X. I have no demands. I'm not sure what could be done here (perhaps a killer application for the smart phone). I just thought I should mention what one customer is thinking instead of just disappearing. Being a user of Skritter for a year and a half now it has come to make up part of my morning routine. At this point though I am starting to think about that hundred+ dollars a year and what else I could do with that money...

Android app would be so awesomesauce...

Very interesting thread. Since we all have different demands on how skritter should work it is unrealistic to think it will be just perfect for everyone. Especially since our demands changes depending on how advanced we are in our studies. For my self I would say that this is just perfect for my needs but I am only at around 2000 characters. Cost is also dependent on our life situations. Fully understand that the cost might be high for students without income but for me with an steady income the cost for this service is very low and I would be willing to pay more for the service since it is cost efficient compared to other services such as one on one training, books etc. I am also using Anki and have bought their Ipad app to support them(him). Anki is however not enough for me. It is just an compliment to study sentences, reading etc.

I am very willing to pay extra for additional content in Skritter. This extra could be the Iphone app, one on one training via Skype, grammar training,pods etc. I like to keep my study to one place and I once thought that Chinesepod could do that for me but I am not that very pleases with their site so I use Skritter instead and import the list from Chinesepod here. I am a long time customer and i will continue to be a customer for a very long time since i really feel that this is a killer app. I have failed so many times before with my study but skritter have taken me to new heights. It should however be nice to have some good deals like signing up for a 12 or 24 month period to an reduced price. Chinesepod do have that every year and I still tend to renew my subscription basically since i like a good deal;-)

@Android lovers: It was just an example! Oh now I've done it...

@Yolan: What you're saying is totally understandable. Anki and ChinesePod and Skritter and all these other tools all do their own thing, each having their own pros and cons. Our goal is to make what for us is our ideal learning tool build specifically for Chinese and Japanese, and to focus on making it as good as possible. If there's one thing that's clear, it's that no one learning technique works for everyone, so go with the one or ones you find work for you. In terms of convenience, we'll be releasing that iPhone app when it's ready so you'll have that to add to your decision making. Maybe that will tip the scales!

@Mandarinboy: Thanks! It's always great to hear when Skritter is being particularly helpful.

@scott - Just checking, what's the status of the Android app? ;)

Skritter will have evolved when there is an iPhone app, and maybe an android app :P

(:

I know I have been ranting on about having the iPhone app, however I really am now spending about 3-4 hours per day studying using my iPad and/or iPhone. It is so quick, easy, simple, distraction free, and I don't have to carry around a laptop any more!

@董雅各 What applications do you use to study on iPhone?

@scott - Just checking, what's the status of the Android app? ;) +1

@James and jcdoss: I once read a bit of a book on how to write Android apps...