Update on the Summary Pages

still no updates on this?

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I’m placing my bets on it never getting acknowledged at this point.

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That´s what I´m thinking too, but I will be annoying and complain here till the end of time just to remind them of their shame. Although it´s probably daring to assume they are feeling any shame about this, considering how they handled it.

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Also it’s probably daring to assume they are reading these forums :cry:

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They might not read it, but new users might read it and draw their conclusions on what they can expect from a subscription

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Well they’ve all but buried the forums now, I wouldn’t be here if they didn’t have the thread previews at the bottom and someone asked a question about a grammar point I was struggling with.

Is it cynical to suggest they maybe removed it because they expected some backlash?

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I think this is probably the root cause for all this.

Some time before the changes, they cleared out the WK store of all physical items and the staff become WFH only. I’m wondering if the same process saw their servers go from physical at their office location to cloud-based so that they could stop paying rent for the office space.

When you operate your own physical servers then it is relatively cheap and easy to store large volumes of rarely accessed data that is useful for analysis but not otherwise useful to make the application work on a daily basis. In a cloud-based solution, the same facility is very expensive over time.

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It´s not the first time I´ve seen this assumption. I don´t think it was because they anticipated backlash for that update in particular, if anything it was probably to limit new users in general to access a space where people are constantly criticising the platform. From their reaction to the update disaster it really seemed like they expected this to be more well regarded.
And if that´s the reason this seems even more shortsighted, because the forums really help user retention I think. I can´t prove this, but there is just so much you can dig in here, be it scripts that make the site a better experience, discussions about learning techniques and resources or plenty of activities like book clubs and so on. And the more invested you are in all of those things, the more likely you are to stay around and renew your sub. But the team has already proven that they don´t care about longterm users.

I can´t see their statistics, maybe all of their questionable decisions have driven up profit like crazy, but sometimes it seems like this is a social experiment on how much stuff you can get away with and still retain a userbase.

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No, they claimed they were planning to replace it with an algorithm, but then why remove it before that project was complete? I would be surprised if the project was real.

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Something fishy was definetly going on. But joke´s on them, after their big update they had record-breaking signups for the forums due to users begging for the summary page to be brought back

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Hold on. Are you saying WaniKani’s infra was running on someone’s physical box…? That’s wild. Considering how small the scope of the infra is, I would be quite disappointed if that was the case :frowning: .

This seems like a recurring theme with WaniKani changes - kill off a feature before deploying a replacement. As mentioned before, a no-go in the developer world even among open-source projects.

That’s a little ironic, considering there was a backlash already before some changes were rolled out. When the Summary page removal was first announced there was already a super long thread and users were told to hold back with any judgement/criticism until the changes are deployed because the decision has already been made. After the rollout there was obviously more backlash.

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If the Christmas sale is anything to go by, then maybe? More people on the forum got lifetime during this sale than two years ago. (I don’t have stats for the 2022 sale.)

2021 before and after sale:
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2023 before and after sale:


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Comparable or not? :thinking:
Maybe off-topic, but I’m curious how many on the forum currently has an active sub. I can’t check it myself though since I’m a lifetimer myself. Would be interesting to see the subscription/lifetime ratio. If somebody with an active sub would like to check for us, go to this page and toggle to the relevant group.

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I think to some degree, it’s a lot of “the rich get richer” and word of mouth spreading, more than any specific changes they’ve made.

I think if they continue to go slowly with improvements they will be overtaken by the likes of MaruMori, or I’m sure eventually either Anki themselves will get a more appealing UI update or another free tool will come along.

I got a lifetime sub in the recent sale. I was on the fence as the trajectory is not great with stuff like the API or summary changes, but I figured I was far enough through that even if MaruMori had content coverage to match tomorrow, it would be too disruptive to switch tools at this point.

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Wait, what is this. I Bought the Lifetime a few days ago and reset to level 1.
I was wondering why i wasnt getting anymore summaries.
Now i read that thats not just a level 1 thing?
It got removed? Why? Well over half a year ago and its still not back?
It was one of the best parts on this site.

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yeah now you need a 3rd party addon for that. we’ve been complaining for more than a year

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I have no idea about the architecture of WK; just barging in to say that an application may run in the cloud without being cloud-native. A cloud-native architecture means an architecture that cannot run anywhere but the cloud, because it uses a cloud DB and the cloud’s scaling abilities. Depending on how the backend code is written, migrating from cloud-based to cloud-native might require rewriting everything.

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I know it’s not as good as WK adding it back themselves, but if you do want it back and are willing to install a script then here’s the summary page “revival” script I made which adds it back (along with a couple of extra features!)

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why cant the wanikani team implement this themselves?..

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That’s something we’d all love to know… Why can’t they add it back and also provide more customizability for WK (eg. turning summary page or recent mistakes on/off)…

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