I'm so frustrated by losing progress due to timeouts

I’d like to believe this because it would, in theory, make turning off session timeouts, or just making them much, much longer easily done.

Flaming Durtles stores everything on the client until your review session is complete, which is why it doesn’t have this problem. It’s also why you can go places with no internet connectivity, continue to do your reviews and keep your streaks alive. Flaming Durtles will just sync everything with proper timestamps when it sees WK servers again. Flaming Durtles is totally awesome that way. Actually, I’d use it as a desktop client if one existed. (I don’t like to type on my phone, reviews take literally twice as long)

However, if all session data is stored on the client, then why have session timeouts at all? And if it’s stored on the client what explains how a refresh after expiration will sometimes retain partially complete items and sometimes not retain them?

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That’s a good question, as a web developer I’m usually forced to do timeouts and popups that ask you if your are still there to extend your session, because someone in ‘security’ wrote a policy. If a user puts their name and address on a form in a public library then wanderers off, we don’t want that. Wanikani does not have this kind of data though.
As for part 2, i suspect the actual session time is longer than the message telling you that you timed out. That’s why it you catch it quick your data is still there, but it is been a few more hours it wont be. The setting that holds the session timeout is on the web server.

The information about partially completed items is stored in your webbrowser’s sessionStorage with a TTL (time to live) of 7 200 000 ms (2 hours):

image

(mc: 1 I believe means “meaning correct: 1 time”)

Therefore there are two possible reasons why WaniKani forgets about the progress:

  1. You close the tab in which you did the review or use a different tab (because of the sessionStorage)
  2. 2 hours have passed since you did the review (because of the TTL)

The timeout that WK displays itself has no influence on the stored progress (I think), but when you reload the tab the items in the queue have a new order which can make it easier for the two hour limit to pass.

The WK team decided to put the progress data into the sessionStorage to fix occasionally reported problems where users had multiple review tabs open which negatively influenced each other. As for why they decided to add a TTL of 2 hours to the data – I have no idea.

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I just remembered why I don’t like Reorder Script with back-to-back method. If I miss a word, instead of circling back around in the queue, it brings it up again immediately. I want at least a little bit of a delay before I’m tested on it again. I can accomplish this by hitting refresh on the page manually but it’s a pain to have to take that extra step. I could probably however modify Reorder Script to fix this.

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Or you could switch from Reorder Ultimate 2 to Reorder Omega which offers three different versions of back-to-back behavior, including “shuffle incorrect” which I believe does what you want (I haven’t tried it myself). Or, if you don’t need the reorder functionality, you can instead use the Back to Back userscript.

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There is a bit of a delay before you’re tested again if you count the summary and next review session.

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As @sinyaven mentioned Reorder Omega (or the standalone Back To Back script) can do this with the behavior set to “Shuffle Incorrect”

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This is probably slightly offtopic, but is there active development of Flaming durtles app?
I’ve seen many people say that they’re just quitting and starting over if they make a typo, so that seems fairly common. I also do it that way :durtle_cat:

Isn’t there high demand for double-check feature within Flaming durtles? Now, responsible usage concerns could be handled many ways, like making it disabled by default, or even requiring a certain level first.
Normally I do WK on the desktop, but occasionally also on the phone, and yeah, as mentioned that can be a bit of a pain.

As for review timeout, I’d agree that it’s kind of an inconvenience. For me, I just learned to try to do the whole batch relatively together, and not wander off for too long. Wouldn’t mind an increase though.

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I don’t 100% get what you’re asking/saying, but I think you’re saying flaming durtles doesn’t have an undo option? I thought it did.

There’s also kakumei with some scripts like undo, as well as jakeipuu.

If you mean if they’re putting that in WaniKani, I highly doubt it.

When I did WK, I put the workstation in sleep mode in a review session and it would pause my progress…but that doesn’t help you if you using the same workstation on other tasks. Have you tried sleeping tab options? I think most browsers have this, it may have the same effect.

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As far as I know, Flaming Durtles is not under active development. The last commit was 2 years ago.

GitHub - ejplugge/com.the_tinkering.wk

However it has virtually every option under the sun. Undo may be hidden in advanced settings, assuming it is not on by default given the question you are asking.

This is really helpful. Thanks for doing the digging.

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If you go into Lesson/review settings (the normal one, not the advanced one), there’s a toggle that says “Delay processing quiz results: Doesn’t process results until the session is finished. Allows unlimited undos during sessions.”

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Oh right. I had a feeling I was missing some option that’s already there. I enabled that and I’ll see how that goes next time I’m doing WK on the phone (provided I typo to test it :smiley: ).
Thanks!

Yeah, double-check being a userscript is probably fine, there’s been a lot of discussion, and I can see how it’s generally tough to decide how would you incorporate something like that officially, if anywhere.

And herein lies the biggest problem.

I was doing reviews in the 7am hour this morning. As usual, I task switched. When I came back to WK my session had expired. I reloaded the tab, and in frustration immediately hit the wrap up button which I have set to 10 reviews. However the 8am hour had passed, the review order was shuffled. and none of my half answered items came up in the wrap up list. My next review session was at 10am and of course now those items come up, but they come up as brand new items. Which is just wrong.

The more I understand what’s happening the more frustration I feel. This should be fixable. And if not entirely fixable, then at least mitigated by increasing the session timeout value so I don’t encounter this situation almost daily.

Honestly, if nothing is being stored on the backend, what is the purpose of an exceedingly short timeout except to frustrate your users?

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I have informed the engineers about this and I’ll let you know what they say.

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Now that you have shown where they keep the two hour session time I get it a bit more. After 20 minutes you might have gone out, found yourself bored at the bus stop, done a few reviews on your phone, then come back, and if the order isn’t reshuffled then items you have actually completed could come back, and I could see things getting weird. I get why they make you click the refresh button now.

I never knew what that wrap up button did, I actually thought it was broken! I will have to try it out. I just click the home button if I want to end the session and come back later.

Seeing how they do the storage, it might be hard to make the time any longer than the min time it takes for an item to come back. For Level 1 & 2 the SRS timings are Apprentice 1 → 2 hours → Apprentice 2. If there’s an item still stored that’s been there from earlier, and then you actually completed it on a different device, then it comes back again but it already has an entry in the session storage, I imaging that would take some handling. My guess is that this is where the 2 hours comes from.

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This thread is confusing for me, because I am fairly certain that when I have this happen to me, the site still marks the word as incorrect.

I have the same situation as the OP. I usually do wanikani at work. I often have to step away, and I come back to see that the review session has timed out. I click the big button on the website and it continues the reviews. When a word comes up, and I got the “other half” incorrect, I clearly see the red “demotion” indicator and the word is marked appropriately.

If you wait longer than 2hrs, your progress is lost.

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This is part of what makes it so frustrating. Sometimes it loses progress, sometimes it doesn’t, based on whether the 2 hr limit has been exceeded, and I’m never quite sure whether it’s been 2 hrs or not, so the effects are totally unpredictable. Sometimes I try to do one word each hour just to keep it “alive” but I can’t always do that. I really just want timeouts to not exist.

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Thank you, I really hope they can do something to help. Workarounds with plugins are workable, but I’d love to see the experience improved for everyone out of the box. :slight_smile: