I've been using the "Add to Queue" feature on the Vocab -> Lists -> Your Queue page to add characters and words to my queue.

Today it doesn't seem to be working. I can paste a list of characters and validate them, and they all turn green. But the "Add 4 Words to Queue" button at the bottom of the screen doesn't seem to do anything.

One other minor point - in testing this just now, I actually pasted 5 characters, but the button at the bottom says "Add 4 Words to Queue" (not 5), and the green counter at the top shows 4, not 5. Not sure if this is related or not; just pointing it out.

It sounds like a problem that's particular to the words you added, or one of them at least. What were the five words that you tried to add? Also, what browser were you using?

If you remove the one character that didn't show up in green from the ones you submit, I imagine it will work. Then we can narrow it down to the specific character or word it coughs up on.

Also, since you use it so often, what do you think of the add word widget? Right now it's just used to add things to the queue, but I'm also going to be using it in other places, such as in Cram Mode and creating custom lists, so it's a high priority to make it as intuitive and easy to use as possible. I'll also eventually be expanding its capabilities so that it also accepts definitions and pinyins, but that's a bit more into the future.

OK, I found the JS error that is causing this. It's not tied to the particular words I'm trying to add, but it is related to how I'm adding them.

I'm pasting the characters in from an Excel spreadsheet. When I do this, there is an extra linefeed at the end of the list after the last character. I'm using FF 3.08, and in the error console, I'm getting

Error: line is undefined
Source File: http://skrit.appspot.com/js/vocabularylists+7.332973428813949084.js
Line: 476

This appears to be related to parsing the empty blank line at the end of the list. When I get rid of this extra line, it works OK (and the off-by-one count error goes away too).

As for the general question about the "Add Word" widget, I find this quite useful and well-implemented. My biggest complaint is probably the fact that it's kind of buried in the vocabulary lists section - it took me a couple of weeks to find it. I had been using the system using just the built-in vocabulary lists, and lamenting the fact that I couldn't add my own characters and words. Instead, I was manually browsing through the lists trying to find words that I'm currently studying in my textbook (Fredlein/Ni Hao) and adding them one at a time when I could find them. Then one day I happened to randomly click on the "Your Queue" link at the top of the vocab page. I guess I had been thinking of this as a section header, rather than as a link to a different functional area, and so I hadn't thought to click it.

I really like the validate/submit model, where I can see exactly what the system is doing with my characters. I had been wondering what would happen when I entered a word that wasn't in your dictionary, and was quite pleasantly surprised to find the ability to add it to the dictionary and provide my own definition and pinyin. Having ability to add a word to the dictionary, and have it treated thereafter as if it were a built-in word, is terrific. One question: when I add a word like this, does it become available to everyone, or just for me? Being able to crowdsource new definitions and have them be available system-wide would give you the ability to quickly expand your dictionary, but then you'd have to put extra effort into policing and validating the user input, I guess.

Yep, the bug was being caused by extra line endings at the end of the submitted text, and I just uploaded a fix. Thanks for the report! Being given the line where to look is a developer's dream come true.

I'm very glad to hear you like the interface for the widget. That's a good point though how it's kind of hidden out of the way. We'll definitely have to consider some way to make it more prominent, as right now it's about the only way for people to have some custom control over what they learn. I'm itching to make the custom lists feature in the coming weeks so that should give you even more control. I can say with fair certainty (nothing's certain, except that nothing's certain when it comes to dates) that you'll be able to make your own lists sometime in May.

And yep, all user created words are instantly available to all users. Right now we have about 600 words that have been created since the widget was made. I'm actually just about to start making an in house system that will allow us to quickly go through and polish all submitted definitions. So what you submit may very well be changed later on, but just so our definitions are formatted consistently and so we can make sure the definitions are as broad as we like. We've also had a few definitions submitted in non-English, so we'll be changing those too I'm afraid! We don't have the resources now to support definitions in other languages, but it's definitely on our future wish list.

But this isn't the only way we've been crowdsourcing; a lot of our feedback coming in through the box below the practice window is people correcting our definitions. It's not as direct as creating the words through the widget but it's still very helpful to us. We really appreciate it!

Thanks for the quick fix! I verified that it is now working OK for me.

In terms of making the "Your Queue" feature more prominent, I'd suggest making it a top-level menu item in the Vocabulary drop-down:

vocabulary
your queue
your vocabulary
lists
options

The "your vocabulary" (or similar terminology) would link to the "Vocabulary" page that the "vocabulary" menu header itself currently links to, to give this item more prominence as well.

Spacing didn't quite come out right in that last post; what I was trying to show was a list of four menu items ("your queue", "your vocabulary", "list", and "options") underneath the top-level "vocabulary" menu header.