I just got my progress email and I have some good news and some bad news.

First, the email is much more full of interesting statistics. That's great! I'm very happy that you've added so much detail.

However, the "minutes practiced" number is wrong; it says

"You've practiced for 0 minutes in the past three days (7/02 - 7/04)."

This is not correct; I practiced for several hours over those three days. All the "seconds per item" counts are also zero, maybe for the same reason.

Then it says "Your retention rate for character definitions for the period was 86.9%." OK, that's great. Then there's a new paragraph that says

"You learned three characters (now at 842 total). You reviewed 64 items, so that's 0 seconds per item."

If this is referring to definitions, it shouldn't say "you learned three characters", which seems like it's talking about something else, like maybe writings. It could say something like "you learned three character definitions". It's not even clear that this paragraph goes with the previous paragraph.

The same issue applies to the further statistics.

Unfortunately the email is now quite long and kind of causes stats blindness; I don't think a textual format is really the best way to present these numbers any more. A more compact table or a spreadsheet would be more readable, and would be much more useful as we could then remix the data.

James

P.S. another issue is that, on the "progress" page, the tooltips for the data points get cut off on the right side. This is less of an issue for the "items learned" graph than for the "time studied" graph, where I can't see the actual number for the latest value at all. This is on Chrome 5.0.375.99 on XP.

James

Yea that email made no sense to me at all. (:

I am referring not to the email (which must be in the heap of month-away emails) but to the progress page. I like the presentation; it is easy to scan and contains all the numbers but I have a few questions.

[BTW: I nuked 3 1/2 weeks ago so a "month" view starts from nothing and goes up to today, I think. I have had the same settings all along: writing, tone and reading practice are all on.]

1)I see:
char writing added = 685,
char reading added = 665,
char tone added = 737.
Why aren't these the same? I am guessing the tone number is higher because of all of the cases of possible multiple tones for one character but I cannot explain the reading and writing totals added being different. Are there characters I am writing but not reading? I scanned the lists I am drawing from and I see green in all the C/T/P boxes... meaning that practice has been done for all of them.

2) Now for words. Here the totals for reading and writing added are the same (484, good) and but the tones added is higher (505). Hmmm, are there multiple tones for a word?

These points are oddities I cannot quite explain, not terribly important. Anyone else have such mismatches or answers about these?

Skritter team - thanks for your good work. You've been busy!

Actually it's been our intern who's been busy in this case! We spotted the error and have fixed it; all twitter and email notifications should be good now.

That's a good idea, James, to make a table. I'll talk with Oliver (the one who made the upgrades) about it and have him try it out.

I'll fix the graphs. I think that happens on all browsers.

The progress numbers, well... those are apparently representing the margin of error. I just did a manual count of your items and you have 503 words, 702 characters of each type (except for character writings, for some reason you have two traditional items there for the trad versions of 壮 and 语). The progress numbers are generated as you go, and apparently they gradually get miscalculated. We'll have to do some really intensive digging down to find the cause of that though...

If you want to sort out the miscalculations maybe this will help, for whatever it's worth:

1) I mentioned the nuke-ing since my history is pretty simple since then: only drawing from Int Chinese and my own custom list and with the same practice settings all along. I paused each list from time to time and added to my custom list while practicing from it.
2) I added a couple of wrong items while making my list (pinyin to wrong character) which I then deleted from practice and from my custom list.
3) traditional chars?, I didn't mean to use any, maybe these resulted from 2) above?
4) I wonder how stats (or other info) are affected by leaving the practice page. I think 3 or 4 chars/words are fetched for practice at a time, and the results returned to the vocab list after the set is complete. But when that set is interrupted, do some stats get updated and not all?

This isn't particularly bothersome really. Thanks for your answers.

Reviews are saved immediately after you finish them. Then if you go back and change your score, they're resubmitted and overwrite the old review. It's only if you don't go to the next prompt after finishing one that its review doesn't get submitted (or if you do, but then leave too quickly or lose connection).

If you leave halfway through a word, some of its characters may have been submitted but the last ones (and the word itself) not submitted.

@scott and @nick the emails and Twitter are only partially fixed. On

date Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 7:30 AM

I got the following email:

It looks like you haven't studied during this time period. Skritter misses you! It's never too late to come back!

...

then immediately got the normal one:

date Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 7:30 AM
Hi jww1066,

You've practiced for three hours and 59 minutes in the past three days (7/06 - 7/08).
...

I wasn't going to complain, but then the same thing happened this morning.

Twitter is also bogus. Around the same time as the "you didn't study" email I got a tweet saying

You didn't study any kanji in the past 3 days.

immediately before the usual tweet. Additionally, I am not studying Japanese, so why does it say "kanji"?

Then, in the usual tweet, it has a broken retention rate:

Learned 12 characters on Skritter (now at 1664) in the past 3 days; goal was 30. Reviewed 267 items in 1:00 with N/A retention.

James

Hi James,

We're currently sending out an email and an alert on Twitter separately for each language. If you have studied anything in Japanese (even just one character, long long ago), then that is why you're getting the "you haven't studied" messages. I'll come up with a better system for this and see about getting it implemented before your next reminders are due.

As far as the incorrect retention rate, are all the ones you got in the email showing up correctly?

Oliver

@Oliver Yes, I think the email retention rates for Chinese are correct.