Here's my next idea: "Skritter contests and tournaments"

A way for users to compete with one another in friendly online timed-contests that test Mandarin character writing and tones.

Here is how it can work(off the top of my head): there can be announcements on the Home page and newsletters of when upcoming Skritter contests/tournaments will be. Users have a window of time (about a 24 hour window of time because of different time zones) to go online to Skritter.com if they want to participate and they go through the list of characters in which they draw and input tones. Accuracy and time of completion of the list will be used to score the users' performance, and the user with the highest score wins. (Optional to the Skritter team: there can be prizes too, such as half-off a month's membership fee, or something else). With or without prizes, I think this can be really cool.

What does everyone think ?

and if there's concern about users working together to cheat by giving each other the list of characters, the solution to that would be to have contests in which users compete with other members in their time zone ( i.e. 8:00pm pacific time )

James (I think?) did organize a similar competition, some time ago. It seemed to me it worked quite well. We should do it again. I were not able to compete the last time due to mid-terms or something. Would like to participate the in the next one.

He's done a couple, if I recall (and I think a couple more before I was around). However, Bohan's idea seems to be more like a timed test and the best performer wins, while James' competitions were based on time spent, total reviews, and new items learned, so it only really works for people who have a lot of free time to spend on Skritter, and I would suspect that most people who blitz a challenge like that pay for it later with excessive reviews and low retention rates for a while until they catch up with themselves.

Then again, it would be tough to devise a contest on Skritter that didn't give a certain group of users an advantage - a pop-quiz type competition like Bohan suggested rewards those who know more characters, write faster, and use the right writing quirks to get perfect recognition, while James' tests favored those users with a lot of time to study and a short review queue at the beginning of the competition.

I like the contests we run now, where it's not about having a ton of time to study, but about being able to study regularly every day. That's what'll give the biggest learning benefit, anyway. What do you guys think about them?

The problem is that we can't give out prizes to everyone who completes a challenge, so we have to pick at random. (The first time we ran a contest, we gave T-shirts to everyone who studied 15 minutes a day for 30 days straight, and we ended up sending out more than 40 T-shirts--oops!)

@nick I'm for it. Unfortunately you scheduled it while I was traveling! But I'll definitely participate next time. I don't think the prize really matters. I didn't offer prizes and people still participated. As you can see with a site like foursquare, people will compete just to be the winner.

@others The problem with user-organized contests is that we only have the tweeted status to go by, and the tweets only have certain pieces of information in them. And of course they can be falsified. Really the competitions should be done by the Skritter team, who have access to much more interesting statistics.

Prizes aren't necessary at all. We can forget the whole idea of prizes.

This is about fun, and challenging ourselves. I actually also like NOT being able to study for it.

What are the daily contests that there are right now? I've never seen them

Three of the people who study for 20 minutes for 25 consecutive days between September 15 and October 15 will win a Wacom:

http://www.skritter.com/newsletters/10-09#challenge

this 20 minutes a day for 25 days thing is cool and I plan on doing it, but I think a weekly or bi-weekly contest (possibly for different levels) can be a lot of fun too. It would sort of be like a pop-quiz, a contest (w/ no prizes, just for fun) and a challenge all in one.

I think prizes can be as simple as getting posted on Skritter as being on the top ten list or whatever. That's very motivating in itself.

@Nicki I agree, that's a great idea. I really hope the Skritter guys consider this whole idea because those of us who are out of school need a challenge/motivation to be on top of our Chinese

@nick I like the newsletter contest, it definitely motivates me to study regularly, and if you guys ever run out of prizes to give away, offering subscription extensions would always be welcomed I think

I like the idea of the contest but with people at different levels and studying different sets of vocab, it could be complicated to implement. The set of vocab which the contest would be running on would have to be set beforehand.

So, for example, it could be a HSK contest, and drill people on the HSK 1 list or so. The drawback of course is that advanced people would be at an advatange, so the system could easily be cheated around by them.