Congratulations to the three people who won the prizes for last month's challenge.

I read on the newsletter that 54 people qualified for the drawing to win the Wacom writing tablets. That's quite a lot of people. Maybe for next month the challenge can be more challenging? How about an hour of practice everyday for a month? Or 10 hours of practice(altogether) by the end of the month? Or something even more challenging like a time aspect and minimum number of new characters leart aspect?

I love a challenge!

next months challenge is "who creates most threads in the forum" ;-)

I didn't get the newsletter.

@wb haha, YES!! I win!!

Yes, well, that's a good idea about how many characters learned in a month. I discovered by just doing approx. 1/2 hr. a day, that I learned 50 new characters. Cool!

As a thread hijack: Well, I did get the newsletter, and can say that the new vocab/lists improvements in it are looking pretty neat indeed (although, as a small note, upcoming 7 days scheduling as currently is better than upcoming 5 as in the previews, otherwise you can't properly see the effect of adding new stuff).

But hey.

And on the off note, I think a punishment for most new threads on the forum would be more appropriate ;p.

Newsletter? It appears that the mailer bollixed it up again - not to be found over here (though I did get a progress reminder today), neither in the inbox nor the spam folder...

@ Byzanti - I like the look of the new interface as well. I am looking forward to playing around with it when they do the alpha roll outs.

where is the newsletter? :O

Ugh, it didn't get out to everyone again? Whack! Maybe we'll have to switch from doing it ourself to MailChimp or something.

It's here:
http://www.skritter.com/newsletters/10-10

We don't want to make the challenge too tough, because we want to keep it in reach of most users, so as to motivate more people. If we restrict it to people practicing an hour a day, then only the most hardcore users will get into it.

(deleted)

How about an average of 30 minutes a day instead of 30 minutes a day? Sometimes it can be hard to Skritter everyday (I try and have a life away from the PC sometimes lol), and I am sure I'm not the only one.

To encourage daily use (isn't that the idea?) set it as an average of 30 minutes a day, but no more than 1 day a week of zero minutes?

Would that work for people?

btw, no newsletter here either, just going to read it from the link :)

You can change your target retention rate though. I find a lower value is better than the default. You can also game Skritter and just lazily guess your way through many things, if you reward retention you're rewarding that and I don't think that particularly serves anyone well.

Just my view mind.

I'd love to be in one of these competitions but the fact is sometimes we get to the weekend and I demand doing something which isn't studying my ass off all day...

I read that there were 54 people who qualified for the challenge, and I figured I'd ask a question that I've been wondering for a while. How many Skritter users are there? If there's no easy way to tell, just forget about it, but I just thought it would be interesting to know.

Thanks for the link to Newsletter, Nick. I didn't get it either. I believe I've always gotten it in the past.

If we're still discussing possible challenges, I think Bohan's idea of 10 hours in a month is a very good one - it's a very reachable target, though notably higher in total time than the last challenge, and it has the advantage of not being a consecutive days thing. Don't get me wrong, studying daily is much more effective than skipping days, but sometimes you simply can't Skritter every day, and a challenge that accepts that as a fact would be a good idea.

我拇指向上给那个主意嘛

Thanks Fatdragon, but I actually miscalculated. 10 hours is 600 mintutes, which is 20 mintues per day for 30 days. (20x30=600) .

What I had in mind was(but I don't think the Skritter guys will go for it) to increase the overall amount of time, but not to have to study every single day, because some people like to take days off.

@JimAndres I've also been wondering that for a long time. That, and where most users are studying out of (China, Singapore,Taiwan, state in the US, Canada, UK, Australia, etc.)

I haven't got the newsletter either.

It is hard for with work, some travel, and other engagements to skritt in a daily basis. I would love to go for an average a day for 28 days for the challenge as in the weekends i have more time than the weekdays, would that be possible? the closest to this would be at least 15 days consecutive with a total of 6-10 hours at the end of the 28 days. if that makes sense!

If we ran that contest, there would be many more "winners" to choose from. We'd have to up the ante to keep it interesting, with the challenge being to Skritter for much more time. Gotta be a challenge to it!

The problem with using an average is that then people will spend 17 hours one day to make up for all the missing days in the time period. If you guys use an average, I would think a weekly average would be more sane, something like "four consecutive weeks where you average at least four hours a week". That way people could work more on weekends and still qualify, but wouldn't feel compelled to put in monster sessions towards the end of the time period.

That reminds me of the yellow brick road toward the end of this post:
http://messymatters.com/2010/11/15/akrasia/

The idea being to give yourself some more leeway, but still have the threat of failure if you get off track at any point (rather than just at the end).

That's a bit more complicated than the current contests we do.

Yeah, you'll end up with people who cram every Saturday to get their weekly averages up.

hehe, i do not have a problem with my commitment device, the problem i have is with factors outside of my control, business trip, vacation "wife request", travel, ..etc that usually means i will not be able to connect for 20 minutes that day to anything at all not just skritter. the weekly average limit sounds as a good alternative.