Hi Skritter team and users,
I have been using Skritter (subscribed) for nearly a week and have encountered some issues so far which has lead me to go to the Legacy (1.0) version of Skritter instead (web version/browser). I had used my android mobile for the trial version but from past experience with spaced repetition/flashcard apps, my phone doesn’t have the storage space to deal with it and I don’t have constant wifi access thus the switch to the web version.
From my brief look at the forum, a few users have mentioned some of these issues but they are not properly resolved (and this has been the case for over a year! I’m guessing it’s hard to fix) or they’re isolated. I’ve got multiple problems bundled together so maybe from a debugging standpoint this could be useful (or entirely useless). Here are my problems:
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Not saving feedback. Despite getting characters right every single time and marking them as “easy” they constantly recur. Characters like ‘yi’, ‘ren’, very easy ones I have to constantly review. It was driving me nuts. This makes Skritter completely useless and defeats the purpose of having a spaced repetition system! Thankfully this seems fixed in the Legacy version.
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Not updating Lists. Lists are set to add as review. I read that clicking add new could solve the above problem (due to potentially too few characters being in the queue) but often pressing ‘add more’ with the button will fail and will only work after mashing the button. Even then, those so called new characters don’t actually show up for review (!!!). I had been studying the same bunch of 50 or so characters for the last few days and only one or two new ones are added (and only sometimes if you refresh the page). It’s extremely inconsistent. But I can’t refresh the page every time I review a character. I even went into Lists manually to add and then went back to study - which had the weird issue of saying there were characters to review, but not actually getting to them or lowering it in any consistent way. Just those same characters…
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Takes forever to add a mnemonic. Not sure if this is related to the other problems, but saving mnemonics requires waiting half a minute or something until they’re saved. This was quite annoying so I just stopped saving them (this will probably be a problem once I get to more complex characters).
3.5. Other possible save issue: When the green ‘saved’ icon appears at the bottom of the page for normal character review it does so infrequently (maybe every 50 reviews) and takes about the same time.
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Raw squig detection is dodgy at times. The most obvious case of this is for characters with tiny ‘dot’ like strokes like yang2 (sheep), yan2 (speech). It will interpret huge horizontal lines as the ‘dot stroke’ which especially for these characters is quite problematic as they already have a lot of horizontal strokes in them. Sometimes I had made large strokes by accident or in a vain attempt to get the program to detect my strokes (nothing wrong with my tablet but how squigs are interpreted as correct or not - any spatial deviation from the practice character is often interpreted as incorrect… e.g. if you write a slightly smaller version of the character it will get confused and completely ruin the spatial relationship between strokes. I find it a lot easier to write slightly smaller versions because the web version drawing space is too large IMO. If it was the legacy size it would be a lot better (and I notice you can choose the size - why isn’t this a feature in 2.0??). I find the squig detection is better in Legacy too, probably partially due to this though overall 2.0 is cleaner especially with its hints (so I have mixed feelings about having to use Legacy).
I found the normal stroke correction a bit annoying as well for this same reason
Note that I am using a Wacom tablet but I suspect this isn’t the problem. -
Using a tablet generally speaking: when clicking ‘next’ will sometimes interpret the pen down as the start of the next character. If this is a tone it is automatically marked wrong. If this is a character it will trigger ‘hints’. Maybe a very short detection delay needs to be added between accepting answers and the next character to avoid this (?)
I’m not sure how to fix the updating issue but that and the squig issue is resolved in Legacy 1.0 Skritter. Although there are features in 2.0 I really like (e.g. clearer example sentences, practice character strokes, stroke order with greater emphasis), 1.0 is ultimately the most useable for me right now.
I read something about reseting the cache that could solve this.if there was a corrupt character cache but that option doesn’t seem to be available anymore as far as I can tell. Could going through definition/tone reviews too quickly (i.e. due to the tablet) cause corrupt files??
Other information: At one stage I had turned off the Tone, Definition, etc prompts (everything but Writing) but ended up turning these back on later. Maybe this did something, maybe it didn’t, I don’t know.
OS: Windows 10.
Browser: Tried Waterfox (x64 bit Firefox) and Chrome. Same updating issue for both, and these are apparently supported browsers?
Other possibly relevant information: I live in Australia (notorious for its generally crap internet).
Hope someone can help. 
I’d like to get the most out of 2.0. IMO an option to change the drawing space size in 2.0 would be a huge help for the squig issue.
