I guess most of us agree: Studying Chinese characters is not so much about ability, it is about motivation, endurance and mental stamina.

The main thing that motivates people is comparison.
So one of the primary reasons why I use Skritter is its excellent progress page which allows me to evaluate my progress and compare different periods of time. This can significantly reduce the number of "lazy days" that most language learners are familiar with.

Motivating yourself by comparing different time spans of your own performance definitely works in the short run. However, in order to develop real long-term motivation, you need to get feedback, ideally by comparing yourself with others. On Skritter, the Twitter publishing feature is already a good beginning, but it doesn't go far enough.

I think it's time for Skritter to get toplists.
Toplists could show who studied most during a day, week, month, total; e.g. counting revised characters, learned characters, hours of work ...
Due to the different parameters, everyone would have the chance to appear on a toplist.

The majority of websites that try to build up motivation work with some kind of toplists, an example is the 百度百科 starlist (http://baike.baidu.com/starlist), although its aim is somewhat different, and a Skritter toplist surely wouldn't have to be as sophisticated.

Admittedly, a toplist could lead to bad incentives (marking characters as right although memorization wasn't really accurate; learning more characters than one is able to "digest" ...), but this should be less of an issue on Skritter than on other pages since I guess most Skritter users take their long-term performance seriously.

Individual user pages would be a great addition as well, especially if they allow users to display their usage statistics.

Given the statistics that you already have, toplists should be easy to code. Since some users may not want to participate, there should be an option to opt out. However, I generally assume most of us would be happy to appear on a toplist.

Yep, that's something we definitely want to try out sometime. I actually already found a ranker library I can use to set this up, so I know how I'll do it. It's a bit lower in the priorities right now though, but know it's on the list!

We also have a bunch of ideas for things that could be ranked outside of the sorts of things shown in the progress page, such as number of feedbacks, forum posts, lists published, words added... might try some of those as well.

We'll see how the motives rank up. We are concerned the bad incentives may outweigh the good, but we'd like to give it a try at least.

Stray observation that's in this vein:

The "10 minutes/day" streak-lottery challenge this month was actually supremely useful to me: it got me to study daily for at least 10 minutes, even when I was utterly unmotivated, because of the challenge. The prize at the end wasn't even really all that important compared to the idea of having a long streak that would be counted somehow.

Eventually I missed a day (out of sheer forgetfulness) and I've had trouble motivating myself since.

So, a leaderboard or something along that line would be cool, but part of me prefers the idea of Xbox-style Achievements - studied 5/10/20/50/100 etc days in a row, for example - or even just a little counter "You've studied for at least 15 minutes the last 10 days in a row. Your record is 15 days." so that the stick remains baited even after a miss.

(I'm less thrilled about number of characters learned. It seems to me that would discourage people who are just starting out, especially if it would take a few years to learn a few thousand characters and they know only 一，二，三， and 你好）

I agree with Zach, I also found the 10 minutes per day challenge quite useful, although Christmas and New Year's and so on were smack in the middle of it, damn it!

I really like the idea of different kinds of badges. Someone else made a similar suggestion in a previous thread and I thought it would be very motivating, particularly if we can tweet out accomplishments.

I think I'm less interested in competitions, though I'm sure some people would really go for that.

Yep, accomplishments are something else we'd like to do. Could show the most recently made accomplishments in the same area.

Good to hear the challenge is helping! We'll be trying different kinds of challenges month to month to see what motivates people the most. Do you think a non-streak version would be less or more motivating? That is, if it counted the number of days you studied whether they were in a streak or not?

As for your concerns about number of characters learned, in order to keep the board fresh we'd probably have 'most learned over x period of time' as well, where new users would probably have the greatest ability to score well.

对我来说 a non-streak version would be much less motivating.
The difficulty is not to study large quantities over short periods of time, but to study consistently every single day. - And that's what the challenge should be about.