I am using shillec's excellent Zhongwen plugin for Google Chrome. I often use the "s" key to add items to my Skritter queue, and this has been working perfectly until just now when I ran into a problem adding 大处着眼. Zhongwen opened the URL

http://www.skritter.com/vocab/api/add?from=Zhongwen&siteref=Zhongwen&lang=zh&word=%E5%A4%A7%E5%A4%84%E7%9D%80%E7%9C%BC&trad=%E5%A4%A7%E8%99%95%E8%91%97%E7%9C%BC&rdng=da4%20chu4%20zhuo2%20yan3&defn=View%20the%20big%20picture%20while%20handling%20the%20details%20(idiom).

However, this came up with the message

"大处着眼" could not be put in our database.

Any idea why this happened? This is the first time I've seen this error.

James

P.S. looks like the URL got corrupted when I pasted it in here. Let me try it again with just the query string:

add?from=Zhongwen&siteref=Zhongwen&lang=zh&word=大处着眼&trad=大處著眼&rdng=da4%20chu4%20zhuo2%20yan3&defn=View%20the%20big%20picture%20while%20handling%20the%20details%20(idiom).

Probably because of the 着 character, for which our mapping cannot include 著 as a traditional form because of its use as a simplified character in its own right. Because the simp and trad appear to not agree, Skritter punts and doesn't create the word for fear of making something crazy.

You can manually create the word via the queue, though.

Hmmm, that would be strange, because 着眼 can be added that way without problems.

Since Skritter is using the Mainland standard, for which the traditional form of 大处着眼 is 大處着眼. So 大處著眼, which is the Taiwan standard, will not be accepted.

Well, also, most of the the words you would try to add to your queue like this are already in the database, which means it would ignore the extra (conflicting) information. 大处着眼 wasn't in Skritter yet, but 着眼 was.

Aha, thanks very much Nick and pts for the explanations. It would be helpful if the error message could give a little more detail in this case, maybe something like "traditional version not recognized".

James