In the interest of trying to build and improve upon the Skritter community we've decided to move the Skritter Forum over to Discourse!

Check out the new forum here: http://discourse.skritter.com/

Why a new Forum?
The current forum is old, and we decided that the simplest way to upgrade it and get a lot more features is by switching our forum software.

Nick, George, and Scott have been using Discourse over at Code Combat for two years and have been really happy with it.

To quote Scott's thoughts on the matter, "programmers in general are big fans of Jeff Atwood, creator of Stack Overflow which is an amazingly well designed system for communicating answers to common programming questions. Discourse is his more recent project to encourage good, reasonable discussions within specific communities through a system of trust and leveling up."

Additionally, by switching to a new forum we can help to keep things a lot more organized and navigable. We want Skritter to be more of a community, and Discourse certainly helps in that effort. The new forum has categories for Chinese & Japanese specific topics. It also has areas for discussing bugs, talking about improvements, and getting to know fellow Skritter users even better. We'll continue to improve on these categories (and add more if necessary) as the forum develops.

What about the existing Skritter Forum?
Existing posts will still be searchable, but they'll be read only. If you want to continue a conversation you've been having, please feel free to create a new topic on discourse. Sorry for any inconvenience this might cause, but we don't have a good way of porting over all of the data in this forum.

We encourage all of you to check out the new forum and keep posting your topics and questions!

If this signals the beginning of new features/ stats and such, call me a keen bean.

Hi
Will it be accessible from within the skritter app on the iOS and Android? Or only at the web link?

@susanne yes, the forum will be accessible from within the Android and iOS applications, although it will probably just open your default web browser when selecting the forum link.

Will the website in general ever be more responsive? I'm in the United States, and the website has been extremely slow and unresponsive the entire year and a half I've been using it.

@jr0026 The short answer to your question is yes, the website will be more responsive. We can't say for certain when these changes will take place, but our team is working hard on implementing a variety of backend changes that should increase site responsiveness.

So we now have the old forum, the new forum, the blog, Facebook, the Google+ test community, github, the Skitter.com home page, and a monthly newsletter. Have I missed anything?

@mikemills, don't forget about our Twitter! ( https://twitter.com/SkritterHQ )

We'll be consolidating some of this stuff in the future, but yea... lots of media channels integrated into companies these days!

Of topic and in response to jr0026's post:
I am in Australia and I have also found communications back to the server from the website and iOS app to be very slow. It can be quite frustrating. When I attempt to add a word in the iOS app, it often takes several attempts before I am successful. I get the message "Could not connect to server. Make sure you're connected and try again."

Will check out the new forum now. Thanks.

@donm, The distance between you and server could be playing some role in the slow connection you're experiencing. Do you find that these connection issues are happening more on Wi-Fi or when you're on a cell network?

I don't know if there is anything we can do about the issue at the moment, but those details might help us narrow down the issue a bit.

@SkritterJake, The problem occurs on both WiFi and the cellular network. Pings to skritter.com average 196ms. Thanks.

donm where in Oz ? and which networks(isp/mobile)

I'm in Sydney and don't usually get hassles like that.

Do get 3G/network timeouts especially when on the train (around Redfern to Stanmore)

@alxx, I'm 40km East of Melbourne. I use the Telstra Bigpond network at work, TPG at home, and Optus when mobile. I experience the problems on all 3 networks. The website is slow, but works. The iOS app frequently times out with the aforementioned error. With some persistence it eventually works. It would be good if I could extend the timeout on the iOS app.