Hello,

There still seems to be a major problem with the counter telling you how many words/characters are lined up for immediate review.

When I load the page everything is ok and as it should be, but after a while the counter is all over the place, jumping up and down, like going from 80 to 105 then back to 90 then up to 120, etc. At times it just remains stuck at one number. The only way to end this madness seems to be reloading the page. Surely this must be a bug, and an old one. I have always noticed this erratic behavihour, only it seems to be worse lately. However that could also be due to the fact that my queue of items coming up for review is getting shorter, i.e. the problem seems to be worse as you approach zero.

Kind regards

Marc

I've noticed this happening too in past weeks. I usually just blame my internet connection though.

People have been reporting this for a long time, although a lot more frequently lately (perhaps something to do with intermittent datastore performance issues). But I surprisingly have never been able to reproduce it. I'm just waiting for that fateful day when I can capture it with my own eyes (and debugging logs).

I've noticed some level of erratic behavior, but not as bad as Marchey has reported. I've also noticed it behaves differently for Japanese or Chinese. With Chinese, it will drop very fast... for every five items I complete, it will register that I've done maybe 10 or more. For Japanese, it's the opposite... for every ten items I complete, it will register maybe 3-5.

Chinese groups more items into one word's prompt.

Say you're prompted for 工作 in Chinese:
工作-writing
工作-tone
工-writing
工-tone
作-writing
作-tone

or

工作-reading
工作-tone
工-reading
工-tone
作-reading
作-tone
工作-definition

For Japanese, this would be just:
工作-writing
工-writing
作-writing

or

工作-reading

or

工作-definition

(The review bar will only go down by the number of items in the prompt that were due, but all have their progress tracked.)

@nick: strange that you can not reproduce it. It has to do something with syncing though I believe. The counter is going down, one at a time just as I would expect it to do, but then, sometimes it just jumps up with a significant number, 10, 20 or more. As I continue practicing it continues to count down from this erroneous number. Eventually it will adjust itself again, but it can take a long time, sometimes more than 15 minutes or so. I usually speed it up by backing out of the practice page and going back in again. I practice with skritter on several computers: 2 at work (during lunch break) 2 at home and a netbook: Windows XP with Chrome and Firefox, OpenSuse 11.2 with Chrome, Ubuntu netbook remix 10.04 with firefox, Windows Vista Home Premium with Firefox and Chrome. I see this behavihour in all cases :-(

Marc

Can I vote somewhere for this being the most annoying bug on skritter?

I find it very hard to schedule my practice. If I start with a practice queue of say 100 and I make a deal with myself to get it down to 50 in one session, it is hard to do if the counter swings up and down all time if it changes at all....

I see the same problem, especially when I practised a lot the day before. But I think it's only because during practising some of the words from the day before become due.

that's what I thought to be happening sometimes, but actually when you go to the practice page, where all your lists and all are, the number is correct and it is almost always different than the one on the writing page.

Apparently it especially adds a big number to the items to review when you get close to finishing your reviews.

It almost never goes down one by one while reviewing, but i remember this has been like this since i joined skritter, back in the free days. But at least it used to be more or less accurate.

So what I do now is making sure review queue is 0, unpause my list(s), add some words for a while and pause again. Because if you don't pause and you think there are 30 more items to review but actually it starts adding new words like crazy...

Yep, I have the habit of going out and in of the practice page just to check what my counter is really up to. The practice page counter is generally completely incorrect.

Yeah, I've been getting back into practicing again and I hear you. I'll bug Nick to work on this more as soon as he's feeling well enough to do work (he's been having something wrong with his eye the last several days).

bump

I h

bump

I have been practicing for a while now, only to see the counter decrease by about 15 when I have been answering maybe 80 prompts.

down a further 10 or so after about 20 minutes practice. I know I am maybe annoying you guys, but i think this is a major bug. You should address it. If I sit down with a queue of about 50 items I expect to work through it in about 15 minutes at most. If after this time the queue still stands at about 40 while jumping up and down wildly (oscillating between around 80 and 20 then you have a problem. Now I must tell you that I really go very fast through these prompts. If there is an error I don't mind. I mean, I don't think about my answers very well, just answer. So maybe the issue is with the synchronisation of the application and the server. So if I need to do things differently, please tell me.

You know, I spent a long time on Saturday fixing several bugs with this, and I was really hoping it would take care of many of the issues, but apparently I haven't hit the one you're seeing. Let me ask a few questions:

1) Do you refresh the practice page before starting a practice session, or leave it open overnight?

2) Is the review bar most wrong while you're adding new items, or is it also bad when you're not?

3) What about when you're doing a bunch of reading prompts in a row?

4) Do you pay attention to the readiness percents in the prompt (like "due (150%)" or "not due (80%)"), and if so, have you noticed any patterns there, like words that are not due being practiced while other words are still due? The review bar should only decrease when you finish an item that's over 100% due, or a new item.

1)No, I always start a new session
2)Difficult to tell. I don't think it makes a difference. But it is true that yesterday i was adding words by the dozen. Don't know where they came from though, because I am only working with 2 lists for the moment. The counter for new words increased dramatically, at a certain moment it was at about 80 new words added. But these did not show up. I have enabled writing and definition practice recently starting with a base of about 1750 characters and 1650 words that I know how to write (and tone definitions about the same numbers). Can this be the reason?
3)I always have mixed practice, doing everything together, but I can test this if you want.
4)There may be a clue there. I noticed yesterday that a lot of words with % < 100 were coming up. Maybe you will have to explain this to me, or point me to the right direction. I mean, if a word is at, say 88% or so. Why am I being asked this word? Ok, I understand it has to come up some time, but why not take it into account in the counter? When I sit down to practice I fix myself a goal. Suppose the counter is at 75, then I would just sit down get it down to 50 and then do something else.

I hope this helps.

Marc

follow up: After writing the last comment the counter stood at 77. I did not touch skritter, left it open. When I came back after my breakfast the counter was down at 51. As soon as I touched the screen again (just one click in the practice window) it shot up again to 71. Clearly it must be a sunchronisation issue. Do you have a routine inside the flash application and next to this a synchronisation from time to time with the server?

If you leave Skritter open, certain words will become due. But the Skritter Flash client doesn't continually revise its count to include words that just became due. It only does it every few minutes while you're using it. So when you started using it again, it counted again and the review bar went up. Somewhat less frequently, it asks the server how many items it thinks are due (doing a more thorough refresh) and updates things that way.

Sometimes you'll see reading prompts that are less ready than everything else because it's trying to do a reading streak. Could those have been the prompts you saw that weren't that due?

Ok, I will let this rest for the moment. But there is something wrong. Maybe one day you will stumble on it and get it solved.

I understand what you say about items being added when you leave skritter open. But still...one last example:

I did a practice session this morning, starting with a queue of about 430, only practising writing and tones. I got the counter down but very slowly, sometimes it would just increase or not change at all. After about 20 minutes of practice the counter was at 390. I left skritter alone and did something else for a while. When I came back the counter had adjusted to 364, more in line with what I expected after my practice session. I resumed practice. At first the counter went down, but at around 355...it shot up again to 388 an ever since this happening (about 5 minutes ago) it is more or less stuck around 385. Let me check now...

just while I was writing this message it adjusted again to 353, again more or less in line with what I would expect it to be.

Kind regards

Marc

From that description, it sounds like what would happen when the timezone handling was wrong. But I fixed it like a hundred times! I will have to take another look. How long ago did you last review the items you were seeing this morning?

@nick: I don't know if you did something lately, but these last few days I haven't had the counter problem anymore. It seems to be totally in sync and it just shows the number that I expect to be there.