Anecdotally I installed an undo script very early on when WK delayed my level up by a few hours because I said that the 十 radical was “ten” and not “cross” and it failed me.
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What interests me about the uproar wasn’t the concern over broken scripts or the lack of love for fixing non-visible infrastructure stuff in the codebase.
Script breakage happens with every update and inevitably dies down as scripts get fixed. Infrastructure improvements don’t show their value until future releases (something users rarely appreciate).
WK deserves a lot of credit for an open, robust, and well-designed API to the back-end. Few companies get that right, and there’d be few useful scripts without it.
More interesting to me were the other concerns that were voiced[1]:
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People really liked those summary pages. I don’t think WK fully understood people’s workflows with them. (I never used them myself, but suspected this might be a concern.)
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The rationale for changing keystroke navigation should probably have been explained more noticeably. Reveal the info panel with f to expose it and e to expand the times (then space to scroll if necessary). This should probably have been explained more.
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Similarly, changing how the enter behaves on lessons should probably have been explained bettter (effectively replaced with g, d, or →).
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possibly with a bit more drama than warranted ↩︎
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I did the same, never got it wrong again though! haha
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Don’t assume everyone uses the app same as you do. I don’t care if I get an Apprentice-level or even Guru-level word wrong, because by the time it gets to Master/Enlightened it will have found its way into my memory in 99% of the cases. That method has worked for me for 52 levels now.
Since Apprentice/Guru items appear way more frequently than upper-leveled ones, doing the reviews can get extremely disruptive when you combine words you don’t care about, typos and words where you forgot to add a synonym.
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I am not a frequent user of these forums, I mostly come here when I encounter bugs. I found userscripts through the person who referred me to WK in the first place, she also included a list of links to userscrits she found helpful.
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I find the onyomi to katakana script vital. Learning onyomi represented in their dictionary form like this creates such a strong distinction between onyomi and kunyomi in your mind, it’s a no-brainer option. It’s crazy that it’s not the WK default.
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Yeah I also take this approach but mostly only for radicals kanji. I tend to be very forgiving in apprentice levels so that it won’t slow my level up.
Also even if you get a kanji to guru while cheating, you’ll still have plenty of opportunities to review it again and again with the vocab. And if later on I realize that it really won’t stick, I just fail it then and it’ll drop down back to apprentice III or whatever. Also having actual words with the kanji often helps remember the meanings, I find.
Of course this is a technique that mostly makes sense for people who really want to go fast and not delay level ups I think.
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Yeah I have Flaming Durtle set up to show onyomi in katakana, and my Anki Kanji drawing deck as well. I think Tofugu decided to use hiragana everywhere to reduce the barrier of entry, so that complete beginners can start using WK as soon as they’ve memorized their hiragana.
It ought to be a user-configurable toggle though, but we know that Tofugu doesn’t like that very much…
I’ve used an anki deck of only katakana words to force me to learn how to read katakana correctly and quickly (or at least as quick as hiragana), it’s been quite effective. I still confuse ソ and ン sometimes though, but that’s because wtf japan.
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I think someone else commented on this post saying something similar, but I’ve never been active on the forum (I sent my first post as a result of the update controversy), but I use user scripts. I’ve always been into customization, and my introduction to Wanikani was this video by Weeb Jail about a year ago.
In the video, he talks about user scripts, and at the time, I remember hating the fact that I’d get the answer marked wrong for a simple typo, so I installed Double Check. Then I realized there are other mods which can help me as well, and it spiraled down from there.
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Interesting. I did get into WK from a YT vid. Never knew about scripts though. I only really checked those out after my leeches started to spiral after lv 24-ish. Well, as my burn-reviews first started showing up I think, and that just caught me off-guard.
I suddenly had a lot more reviewing coming in, and it showed in my increasing numbers of mistakes.
I won’t rely on a script letting me to mark wrong answers correctly though. there is always the more “self-punishing” 
scheme of closing down your tab and restarting the session, forcing yourself to do a couple of more immediate repetitions of the correct answers of items.
I find that helps - a lot - in the long run. Just trying to play off the mistake is often not fully understanding why it went wrong (speaking as a user with no disabilities). You could take just a 1/4 second longer to let your eyes see your own answer before pressing enter, and you’d save yourself the trouble of getting it wrong from a typo.
My personal head cannon for the “black box” new design of the answer field, it exactly about that - how to draw user attention to your answer to force you to check that answer.
It’s not subtle, but it certainly did work for me. I still disable it though. Aesthetics over everything! it’s a sore for the eyes in the end for me. ^^;
I managed to progress to level 42 and never used scripts before mostly because I used WaniKani on a variety of platforms and thought it would be a pain to keep the scripts running on all.
Reordering items I didn’t need as vocab is meant to strengthen kanji so the order radicals → kanji → vocab made sense to me. Typos weren’t a massive issue either, but synonyms unfortunately were and that got me out of WaniKani eventually.
I think the overall design of the system is good, but forcing people to learn radicals for several months, predefined US-centric mnemonics not being for everyone, the inability to instantly clear already known kanji and the sparsity of synonyms in English wasn’t for me 
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Started wanikani 1.5 years ago (taking my time) and have been using scripts since quite early on. So much so that before I noticed the official update post on the forum I had thought wanikani must’ve been hacked since it seemed so outdated and lacked many useful features.
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Reordering doesn’t let you break the radical → kanji → vocab progression, it’s more about being able to start the new radicals immediately when you get a new level without having to go through all the vocab first for instance.
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First time poster here. Taking your observation at face value, how is that not a problem? We put time and money into WaniKani, and (often inadvertently) lock ourselves into their rigid system. Then we go to the forums, where the purists have no empathy for us because that (twelve year old) system works for them. Pure SRS is not a magic bullet — it works for some, and it makes learning impossible for others. We pay the bill, why shouldn’t we get the choice?
The problem here is not a bunch of unreasonable meltdowns. It’s an app without basic accessibility.
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I actually had the same sort of viewpoint early on, as I started using Jakeipuu and didn’t rely on the feature at all, even when I knew I made a typo and knew what it actually meant. I realized this just hurt me in the long run and gave up on it. Eventually, I went down this road of marking answers as correct, even though I probably should’ve marked them wrong, which is one of the reasons why I reset my level from level 18 to level 1 back in December (along with having a huge pile of reviews and forgotten words).
Now, I’m much harder on myself. I can recognize when I get it wrong, and even if maybe I’m letting something slip through the cracks, the next time it shows up, I’ll likely get it so wrong anyway that it won’t matter. When I’m doing my reviews late at night, I’m bound to make a typo here and there, so I’m not as hard on myself during that time.
I think it’s an entirely subjective experience, and you should pick what works best for you. If you find yourself marking the answer as right even though it was wrong, don’t use double-check. If you find having to force yourself to input the right answer without having the crutch of knowing you can just re-do it if you make a small typo helps you, that’s okay too. 
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Oh, I’m no “purist.” I use plenty of scripts, Double Check included. I can’t sympathize with the people throwing fits. There are alternatives that can be used for the time being (Android: Flaming Durtles, Apple: Jakeipuu, and PC looks like a refresh works at the moment). Is it a pain? Yes. Is it the end of the world and/or does it have me literally shaking because I’m so worried about not burning an item because I can’t slow down and make sure I type correctly? No.
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I’ve not used any scripts and I’m at 22
I think many before you have joined you in exactly realizing his same thing. I’m much more lenient but I do think there is reason to try to navigate between these two positions for sure; in the end, only you know how your use of a scrip will either enhance or disrupt your learning experience. We’re all in charge in making the choice in where to go with that.
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I basically haven’t used scripts. For a while I used the heatmap script just to see my progress.
When I used my phone I used Wanikani in the browser, I never downloaded an app for it.
I made it to level 60 in slightly under 2 years. I am neurodivergent, but maybe that was more of an advantage than a hindrance.
When I make mistakes I just see it as an opportunity to review the item again and memorize it better. If I already knew it I’ll get through future reviews very quickly, if I didn’t know it then it’s good to have extra practice.
I use the double check/undo userscript feature. I was up to level 42 and I’m making my way back up there.
I also use flaming durts on my phone whenever I have some spare time and want to do some reviews, but I still do the bulk on my pc.
Personally I don’t see undo as a required feature for me, but it’s for sure a massive improvement. It mainly allows me to very rapidly go through all the reviews I get correct (which is most of them on a bad day). I don’t want to spend more time than necessary on reviews, thankfully especially the second time through some of these levels I already know most of these fairly well or learn them quickly, so not having to worry about typos or missing synonyms is a pretty big deal.
I have a tendency to sometimes type things that don’t match what I’m thinking or make really odd typos that don’t seem to make sense, especially when I’m going fast, undoing just makes the whole process feel much better.
It wouldn’t be the end of the world if I reviewed some of the kanji or words more but in the end I’m not here to do reviews or even learn vocab, I’m here to learn to read kanji. learning japanese for the most part is “out there” reading books, listening to videos/podcasts/livestreams/people and hopefully having conversations myself, this is just a means to an end and undo is a means to make the means better.
so yeah not completely essential, but I really would rather not lose it.