the amount of creativity and sheer hacking spirit that went (and still goes) into the user script ecosystem is impressive, laudable and inspirational.
On the other hand, it’s also a maintenance nightmare as this situation precisely shows.
The WaniKani API is famously stable (which is why the mobile apps continue to work the way they did) and trying to modify a page that is already rendered by injecting some arbitrary JavaScript is just inherently a hacky solution. Again, impressive that this all took off - but I know of no other web app where this is the modus operandi of a huge chunk of its active users. Maybe the modding scene in video games comes close to an extent.
So… should maybe somebody just take the WaniKani API and write an alternative - dare I say, better designed - web frontend for it? I’m not sure if that’s allowed, maybe that would be against the TOS or something. And also, I can’t be the one to do it, since I couldn’t design a good looking website if my life depended upon it.
But, morally, this seems like the right thing to do here.
Any sitewide update that doesn’t incorporate features from widely used scripts feels like a major waste of time since you are just alienating your regular users who depend on the added functionality and will have to struggle through the vanilla experience for days or weeks before the site is feature complete again. Additionally, removing the Summary page is just a silly move, I really hope you consider adding it back in because having that “you’re done and this is how well you did” screen does help with motivation, especially since I use the percentage I receive to determine how ready I am to load up on new lessons after a big review session.
Oh, also, THANK YOU for continuing to provide detailed change logs when you make updates. I can’t stand it when services silently change things and you’re left guessing.
And I’m right here complaining with everyone, I just don’t think they ought to undo the work they did on the backend - so not a complete rollback but rather undoing the worst UI offences within the new framework (and then hopefully not upsetting userscript compatibility again for a long long time).
I think one of my original comments may have came off a bit too venomous. I don’t think EVERYTHING, needs to be undone, but what ever is going on with the UI (on desktop specifically) and temporarily killing off key 3rd party addons wasn’t a very wise move IMO. Certainly there were (probably) backend changes made for the better, and apparently someone has vouched for the mobile site being much better than what it was, but other than that, I’m not sure people are enjoying this update very much.
Thanks a lot for your feedback @Timirl! Would you mind emailing us about this bug at hello@wanikani.com so that we can work on a fix? This definitely should not be happening and we’d like to understand why it is.
I wonder if we’re just a vocal minority though. Maybe the vast majority of users just “rawdog” stock WK? I wonder how many make it to 60 that way, and how long it takes them.
Completely agree. The lesson completed count helped me assess if I wanted to advance with the lessons, and I always looked at the summary page to get a sense of what I learned. I don’t even see an upside to why these were removed … I just don’t get it. I hope this will be reversed.
Flaming Durtles, and yeah. Though it still kinda sucks, it’s not like its UI is great by any measure. And it sucks having to go through my tablet and its bad keyboard to do reviews. It coasts off having the features that the main site has no excuse for continuing to not have natively.
Flaming Durtles is a mobile app. There’s also other mobile apps. But I don’t currently know of an alternative desktop/web frontend (although that could just be my ignorance).
Flaming Durtles. It’s genuinely a great app with a ton of configurability and additional bells and whistles over stock WK (stroke diagrams, pitch accent info, a very complete search function with tons of filters etc…), absolutely worth checking out for Android users.
I see, yeah, I don’t have a clear idea of the terminology here^^; Anyway, from what I understand these frontend elements and properties were organized differently accross lessons and reviews, so previously if you wanted to make certain changes and have them be consistent accross lessons and reviews you would have to make them twice and in different ways. I might be wrong but I think that is the gist of it.
And with that, I hard agree. A complete rollback might be excessive (and I don’t hold the technical understanding to really be speaking on a rollback in that capacity anyways), but I felt that the forums’ reception to the update should have been grounds for some sort of temporary rollback, at least to the UI? Again, maybe this isn’t possible for a variety of reasons, but as I’m doing more lessons and reviews, I’m really finding a hard time understanding how anyone could have believed these UI changes could have been perceived as improvements.
) that ppl keep mentioning, is exactly that.