Hey, at the moment i am just concentrating on getting the 'Chinese alphabet' of 6000 characters down. Naturally Skritter is a key part of this, but i just found out that it only has 3900 characters. Are there any plans to expand this number soon?

As people are adding words using characters that we don't have, they are added to our queue and we create them. I suppose we'll eventually hit 6000, but the rate of requested characters has really slowed down. Even when we added support for all of ChinesePod's words and a bunch of new textbooks, it was only a few hundred extra characters.

But don't worry -- if you want to study a character, you can dump it into Skritter and we'll make it if we don't have it. And if you do get to 6000, we'll give you some tremendous prize or something, because that's some serious linguistic ambition.

Hey, i asked for a character to be added, but what happens after that. It was a fair while a go and i have checked and its still not been added. How long does it normally take and Will it be automatically added to your list or will you be notified when it has been added so you can do it yourself?

We've been working through a big backlog of requested characters, but right when we were almost done, we had a bunch more get added from ChinesePod and several textbooks, so we didn't put them up.

When we get back into it next week, we'll finish them up. I'll then make a blog post listing the new characters and words containing them, and you can add the ones you couldn't add before. We haven't been keeping track of who requested what, unfortunately.

Going forward, are you planning on being able to track who requested what? That sounds like a useful bit of functionality. I know I've requested a handful of characters, but I haven't been keeping track of which ones, and I'd be unlikely to spot them in a big list of all the newly-added characters (especially given that they are, by definition, characters I don't know and probably wouldn't recognize).

that would be cool, but it would also be a bit pointless. as soon as skritter hits the magic number of characters, probably somewhere around 6-7000, then there will be no need to add characters because there are only so many you need to know.

True, if they're going to be adding thousands of new characters to get us to the 6000+ range, then the "add character" functionality will be much less important. But if they're slowly adding a dozen characters here and a dozen characters there, as people request them, then it will take a lot longer to get to that point, making it useful to keep track of which of your requests have been added.

A better character request system goes on the to-do lis.

jpo, I can manually check which one's you've requested and let you know when they're ready; I don't want to do that for everyone, but I can perhaps do it for everyone who asks, this next time, when I get them all online.

Thanks Nick, I appreciate it.