To have it as an option would be simplest design option. Keep it on my by default the 10 people don’t enjoy it can turn it off.
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@WaniConti, thanks for acknowledging the problem I guess, but I can’t believe that you’re so casual about it. I think I’m speaking for many users if I say that the summary page was quite essential to my kanji studies. Review success percentage is an important metric. Reviewing mistakes after a review session is indispensable (and no, I don’t think that the “recent mistakes” quiz is accomplishing quite the same thing).
To be perfectly blunt, if after all this time you’re still in the brainstorming phase on how to bring back the summary page “in some form or fashion”, you’d probably be better served to roll back to the old version of the site. Maybe, as others have suggested, under a different subdomain - old.wanikani.com?
Improvements to the site are welcome - there hasn’t been a lot of that in the past few years - and if the new update is laying the foundations for them, great. But the recent roll-out brought only usability changes, removed features and disrupted user scripts. That’s not how to do this.
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AGREED!
@Aikibujin — … maybe. I know there is a lesson-ordering in the main settings, but still, I don’t wish to do only older vocab as then it would mean all the radicals at once then all the kanji, with the setting that would make it so… I really do prefer a light sprinkling… ^_^;;
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That’s the main thing that I hope they take away from this: That they should involve users when they are going to make big changes.
Most of the complaints could have been avoided if users were given a chance to see/try what was coming and to give feedback and if script makers were given more time to update their scripts. Which of course requires properly notifying everyone about the upcoming changes.
It’d have taken longer before they could push out the update, obviously, but the end result wouldn’t have stepped on as many toes. And mobile users would still have been able to immediately benefit from the changes via the “preview” subdomain.
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Why is it taking so long to get the summary back?
It’s been 2 weeks!!
The new update has improved nothing for me and only made things worse.
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I guess it has to do with the removal of session. They mentioned that there is no timeout now if you are taking too long for a review, and I guess the session was used to generate the summary.
Yeah, I was aware of the session mechanic.
But now it seems like an excuse.
Roll back the old version and go back to the drawing board, WaniKani.
Having a review summary, a grade, after a test is the most basic element of learning.
This incompetence is infuriating.
It seems they only pushed this update to reduce their development costs in the future.
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To me it seems this is not reducing development cost but the server cost for storing session, and that’s why they are so relutant in rolling back.
Hey Karstux! I didn’t mean to sound casual about the changes. We realize that a lot of learners liked the review summary page so we are thinking of ways to re-implement something that will satisfy learners and the way they used the page. It was essential to remove it to get rid of session timeouts, which was one of our goals to streamline lesson quiz and review sessions so they weren’t interrupted by a timeout.
We have received a lot of great feedback about how users used the summary page and we hope that whatever replaces it will combine some of those ideas to create something that will be useful to users. We can’t bring back the summary page or a previous update of WaniKani, but we really value all of the feedback that we have received and we are looking forward to adding more features that forum users and others have asked for for a long while now!
-Nick at WK
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Thanks for reaching out on the topic Conti. I don’t necessarily feel you were casual, but I must side with karstux comment over the fact of you letting us know that you are ‘still in brainstorming stage’ is indeed very worrisome to hear.
It sadly tells me that you are perhaps not giving this topic enough priority as it should, since we are getting close to 3 weeks from the update (and a very busy Update thread in the forum that had to be closed for some reason). I work in tech as Product Owner and I cannot believe that a straightforward thing as bringing the same functionality can be so hard to start working on: the specs and users stories are virtually there > make it work the same way as it was before and amend the mistake (heck, you also have the UI and View ready to hook in)
If you want to improve it later on, great, but first take care of your users (specially those who have invested a lot on the site with their time and/or money), you are a live service very ingrained in your users habits and goals. But who knows, perhaps your KPIs are better than ever and we are minority in this complaint (could be, but I doubt it).
Please don’t take my comments on a personal way, I’m also in the other side of the equation when I release an update to my users > I’m just speaking my mind in a honest way on how Wanikani is handling this topic as feedback which hopefully proves useful.
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Sadly the fact that you were seemingly blindsided by how many people like and use the review page and that you still have no concrete ideas what to do about it now shows to me how out of touch you appear to be to a big part of your userbase. This makes it hard to recommend wanikani to other people that want to learn Japanese. Not too long ago I would have recommended it to others without a doubt, but now I probably won’t do that again.
Also, while it is nice that there is no timeout anymore, from my point of view it is not exactly productive for the learning process to have a single review session so spread out that the reviews would time out to begin with.
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Hi Nick, I’m puzzled that despite numerous threads and comments about the summary page on the community forums, you still seem to think that the summary page was a nice-to-have functionality that “a lot of learners liked” rather than a must-have for many users. A workaround replacement for the summary page was built within a few days of this update by one of the users, but yet the Wanikani dev team is only just in the brainstorming phase on how “something similar” could be implemented? To me, this really reflects a disconnect between wanikani users and the dev team. Like many others on this thread have already said improvements are great, but this really is not how to design and implement changes on a product we pay for.
(P.S. I personally have never had a problem with sessions timing out, so I’m ultra baffled that why a choice was made over fixing a time-out issue vs. removing the summary page. Regardless, there should’ve been a way to implement a change without breaking another functionality for everybody.)
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At this point, bring back timeout. I love timeout. If it brings back the basic functionality of this website I paid for a few years go, please, time me out
(Edit: Anyone else suspect, in the dark regions of their mind, that Elon Musk secretly bought this website for another 44 billion and is just trolling us with poor decisions?)
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Like many people above have said, I really miss the summary. I’m ok with the timing out being gone, but actually I liked it. It forced me to focus on my reviews until I got them done. Squirrel! I gotta do the dishes, get more coffee, I wanna look up that word I just got wrong, ooh new text message…I’ll finish reviews later. If “Time Out: On / Off” was an option, I’d definitely have mine set to ‘On.’
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I continue to have a hard time believing that.
I’ve heard two stories about why the review summary page was removed:
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Because jQuery had to be removed, and so apparently local storage couldn’t be used any more since it relied on a jQuery plugin
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Because you wanted to remove session timeouts.
I don’t quite understand which of these explanations is true, they seem a bit contradictory since 2 seems to imply that sessions lived on the server (otherwise why have session timeouts at all) while 1 implies that sessions live on the client.
Regardless, I don’t think any of these is a sufficient reason to drop the review summary page:
In case of 1, it’s perfectly possible to use local storage without using jQuery.
In case of 2, I don’t understand why you have to remove sessions in order to remove session timeouts. You could just have sessions that don’t time out instead. When the user starts a review, first check if there’s already an open session. If yes, add the review to that session, otherwise open a new one. When the user completes the last review in a batch, make an API request to close the session and get back the summary page result data (this might require a new endpoint). You can even get rid of closed sessions (so that they don’t clutter up the DB), since the only point of sessions is to temporarily store what reviews were done in one batch. Obviously this isn’t perfect, since users might navigate away at any point without ever “closing” a session, but so what?
This really doesn’t seem like rocket science to me, so I don’t understand what the big deal is.
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I think they are just trying to frame this as a “technical necessity” to the community to avoid more backlash 
: they move away from a discussion around the question of if it was a good or bad idea to remove it (a discussion which everyone in the community can have an opinion).
Might work to a certain degree, but for people that know/work in tech it make little sense and feels like a very weak excuse for what happened.
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I’ve honestly been finding myself using it less. Tsurukame at least has review pages and ON reading in Katakana, but they don’t have the Extra Study section and I wish they did.
I just go on WaniKani for the recent mistakes and burned items. But I don’t know something about this update they did and the way they did it just made me kind of less interesting in WK. I haven’t tried to learn any new words since the update. Just been doing reviews only.
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Hey Nick. The comment I want to say to this isn’t directed towards you, but more of the people at WaniKani in general. I just find it strange that the WaniKani team ‘suddenly’ realized that users loved the review summary pages so much. It’s as if no one on the WK team has ever studied before whether it learning a language or any other subject just knowing what one gets wrong and being able to look at that percentage to see how one did seems kind of obvious.
I also find it weird that you guys were so focused on getting rid of the session timeouts that I’m not even sure how much I have seen that requested under the feedback section. I’ve seen ton of requests asking for WK to have a dark mode for years yet no one has seen that happen.
I also agree with the other users that I think it’s weird that the WK team is currently brainstorming how to implement summary review pages. I would think something like that should have been brainstormed and figured out ahead of time before the updated went live. I don’t know why some people on the team thought that the Recent Mistakes section would act as a complete replacement for that. The Recent Mistakes is more of an add on, but it could never fully review the Summary Review Pages.
I have seen people beg including myself beg for summary review pages for the burned items under the Extra Study section. I still can’t wrap my mind on how time outs takes on a higher priority then the list of things WK users have listed for years such as having a dark mode. So when you say that the WaniKani really values the feedback from my perspective it doesn’t feel that way. It feels like users are ignored and brushed to the side. So I really do hope the WaniKani team is able to bring back the summary review pages and add on the features that users have been requesting for years.
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Once again, users to the rescue! There are at least a couple of well developed dark modes among the userscripts.
But this. I am not using Extra Study because of this 
Yes luckily Tsurukame app has a dark mode. I was just making the point that a lot of users over the years have requested dark mode and WK team’s focus was on the timeout.
1 Like