I got through enough of my review pile that the blue bar wasn't full, but it then started doing the old thing of sticking and jumping about. It's kind of distracting, it will go from 7 to 37 to 8 to 30 to 80 in a few characters, sometimes jumping halfway through writing a character. This would be good to fix. I never got to zero, although I am adding early and often, so maybe that affects it.

I'm sure you could do cool things with the progress bar. I'd like to see it have some mechanism for displaying when there's more than a 100 items. And it would be quite cool if items that were coming up for review in the next x minutes were shown in a lighter shade of blue, say half as strong for those in the next ten minutes, quarter as strong for those in the next half hour, light green for any due to be added.

While I'm at it, does the "added" bar just refer to "new" characters in the session, or does it get incremented when a character goes above the "learned" threshold too?

Something has been really strange with the review scheduling for a while. I haven't been able to get down to zero for a LONG time. This is actually more of a problem than it seems, because I have no indication of when I have finished my daily review.

At one stage I couldn't get below the 400s, now I can't seem to get below 1000.

I think George knows about this problem and is working on it this very moment, am I right?

I think it's one or two things.

One, I think the review bar isn't working properly right now. We're trying to get it to update dynamically, but it might be getting a little off while practicing. The most reliable way to see the number of items you have to study is to look at the home page, which does a more thorough calculation.

For you Zach, I think the high number of items is due to weaknesses in the scheduling. It looks to me like you're getting inundated with older words. I think this is happening to people who knew a lot of words and characters coming into the program; the scheduling is not getting words you already know out of the way fast enough. I'm currently working on changing it so that words you never get wrong get scheduled farther out in the future faster than normal. To deal with this until that happens, I'd say use the Save Me button to dilute this large number of reviews and spread them out over the coming months. Then you can get back to working on new characters and words.

Both the scheduling and the review bar are high on our priority list! Hopefully both will be working better by the end of this week. Those are some interesting ideas to further improve the progress bar, but besides making it show for higher numbers, I think we'll be too busy for a bit to make further improvements, I'm afraid!

Scheduling adjustments would be good. I see lots of characters that I already know making up parts of other words. I'm now spending half my time pressing "show" (to double-check I'm right), tick, then -> to go to the next one, and quietly cursing when I mis-hit and mark a character or tone wrong when it should be right. I still feel like I'm not seeing enough really new characters, although perhaps it doesn't look that way to your scheduling engine as I'm making plenty of mistakes along the way. I just trust that the gaps in my knowledge will get fixed along the way, but I definitely feel that the scheduling isn't helping me here in a way that I can't put my finger on. I kind of feel I'm overpractising some, but underpractising others, so am reluctant to use a blunt tool like "save me", I've also just started trying to reduce my recall % to the minimum, not because I don't want to remember things perfectly, just because I feel the scheduling is not keeping progress quick enough. Rough thoughts I know and maybe not too helpful, but trying to work out how I can progress more quickly.

I'm now up to 1200-ish characters learnt with Skritter, after 100 or so hours and 20000+ character reviews (yay! and is it really 20000 characters? wow that seems a lot in 100 hours). My target is 3000-odd characters learnt by 300 hours, but secretly hope can get there more quickly than that...

Scott. I'm quite sure there is something wrong with the scheduling code. It is impossible for me to clear my review queue.
I just spent one hour studying and the review counter only went from 1079 to 1003. That is only 76 items cleared in 1hr, impossible.
I monitor my review bar and it goes down as expected when I start, until I hit a certain point. After this point the review bar keeps refilling as fast as I can clear it.
I can quickly rush and get the bar down to 980, but the bar will refill to over 1000 every time in seconds.

There may be an error with the counter, but I think this problem is related to the code that inserts new characters in the middle of the review queue. I started encountered the problem when it was implemented, now the 'untouchable' characters have grown to over 1000.

Its starting to bug me because I know there are 1000 items that need to be reviewed but I can't reach them.

Help?

Well, 1000 is kind of a magic number. The counter breaks down counting by querying for individual groups of items broken up by two properties: style and part. So currently there are 6 queries available:

char + simp
char + both
char + trad
tone + simp
tone + both
tone + trad

Of course, depending on your options, some of these are skipped. You're studying simplified only, Zach, so the two trad queries aren't done for you.

The server, though can only count to 1000; it's a limit put in place by Google App Engine. So for each subset of items it can only count up to 1000. You, Zach, apparently have something over 1000 items that are characters and are in both styles, and very little else! So you practice a bit, Flash updates your number dynamically, bringing it down below 1000. Then the server is queried to make sure the number isn't getting too far off the mark. There are still 1000+ char/both items and so the number goes right back to the top.

So I suppose in order to handle this case, whenever one of the queries goes over 1000, the system shows you that it's actually 1000+. So I can't really tell you how many items you have to study, Zach! It's too many to count! Not really comforting, I know.

However, a plan is in motion to decimate all of your too huge to count due reviews. I'm soon going to be going through everyone's useritems and pushing much farther back all the ones that you've never gotten wrong. So this will bring all of your review queues down and greatly decrease the amount of time spent reviewing things you already know. You alone Zach have at least several hundred of these in that char/both category. So I'm pretty sure by the end of today, you at least will be seeing a lot fewer items to review. I'll also work on the presentation when that 1000 limit is hit.

Thanks for explaining Scott!