Changes after the update

For the podcast, should premium subscribers still have the dialogue text displaying? I mean in the "Information" field in iTunes, not in the "Lyrics" field. Because I don't have the dialogue text anymore.

Something's very odd with the RSS feeds. With NetNewsWireLite, I've got zero, zero, conversation items for Nov 28th and 29th.

As has been mentioned in another thread, the traditional html absence is becoming keenly felt...

All forums and blogs appear to be currently down.

Sailing Exercise Two: Not possible to draw lines.

Please advise. Tnx.

@Phil -- confirmed as a known bug. thx.

@rjlee818 -- will look into it.

@jane -- perhaps we'll be able to explicitly offer display choices (simplified/traditional/tones/numbers) in the future...?

I really like the addition of traditional characters in the lessons. I feel the numbered tones are very clear and easy to read. As another podi suggested, the option as in the exercises would be perfect, but if this is not possible I am really happy to have the simplified and traditional characters together

Getting Newbie files in itunes that was not in requested in my feed.

hello.

"hard of hearing" Exercises #2

not functioning.

please advise.

Tnx.

I am still getting misdirected from feedreaders (Bloglines/Pageflakes). Example today:

Bloglines:

"Table Manners and Tipping by jankroezen

That's so cool. Being quite tall myself, I hear it from time to time here too. This is my first post on ChinesePod. Really great website. Keep up the good work."

Links at Cpod to a blank lesson. Conversation is actually in Newbie - So Tall

I raised this before in another thread but have seen no comment nor anybody else reporting the problem. Could you confirm that this is a known bug being worked on or let me know if you think it is a problem at my end?

segeda,

Not quite yet. We're crossing stuff off the bug list left and right, but we're still working hard on some issues. The MASSIVE vocab import is not quite done.

Not sure if everything is back to normal with vocab engine...most of my vocab is still missing.

LostinAsia,

Yes, we do want to know. We want to fix all of this stuff. We want the site to work like a dream.

Thanks for the help!

Update from my end... RSS feed for conversations still odd (NOTHING today?! I don't think so!). Podcast not updating properly: I still only get the non-subscriber podcast. I can behave within the site as a full subscriber. The home page now looks right again--no more lessons from months and months ago.

On a Mac, Safari/ Firefox.

This may or may not be helpful, but I thought I'd let you know.

something not linked to the recent update but I think should be fixed is, returning to my 'conversation' page http://chinesepod.com/connections/userid after some inactivity, I get a 404 error message : Error 404 - Not Found The page you requested was not found... This is neither friendly nor terribly helpful, presenting me with a sign-in screen would be a lot better

LostInAsia,

You're supposed to be getting what you're supposed to be getting, not what you obviously got. We're updating the RSS stuff today. Will check to make sure the permissions are properly set.

One potentially confusing issue has been having bookmarked lessons appear about "Future Lessons" and "Future Extra" content. This is being resolved -- default behavior will be to have all of this content appear right at the top of the Homepage, pushing down any pre-existing bookmarks.

Zuber,

Congrats on the baby! How exciting! :)

As far as the tech issues, they will all be solved sooner rather than later (we hope). I know it's frustrating, and we at Cpod thank you for being our loyal, patient poddies. An ETA is hard, but please be assured we are taking note of each individual problem you mention here and are repairing it all as quickly as possible.

Is there an ETA on when the vocab issues will be fixed? Not being able to move words from my "Current words" list to my "archived words" list is quite inconvenient. Thanks!

On an unrelated note, my wife and I are going to be having a baby here in Shanghai this May!

Any chance of backing up to pre-scheduled maintenance version? And give it another go later after off-line work? I'm not sure the changes being made are worth current inconveniences.

Bazza,

No problem to view and update my profile

And point 4 (minor), is it possible when the mouse is over the exercise that the focus is switched to the exercise and scrolling the mouse wheel scrolls the exercise up and down rather than the web page?

Regarding Intermediate lesson, Sydney, Australia, excercise 3, Fill in the blanks:

1. A general question/request; why can't pinyin (or traditional/simplified characters) be pre-selected as default for all excercises?

2. When I select pinyin and do the exercise and score e.g. 5/7, click restart, the test clears and reverts to characters and then I need to first select characters and then select pinyin again to finally get back to pinyin.

3. The first time I do the exercise zhong4shi4 appears twice as an option (but no yang2guang1). The second time I do the exercise yang2guang1 appears twice (but no zhong4shi4)

Has anyone tried updating their profile lately? I just tried and got "You must login or signup before viewing this section."

I was definitely logged in.

Um... am I SUPPOSED to now be getting only the main podcast in my iTunes feed? Because there's no more Fix, no more Dialogue, no more PDF. I seem to also have the "non-subscriber" podcast (i.e. without dialogue). Somewhat worryingly, this wasn't a problem for the first few days after the update, and now it is.

Oh, and it case it needs to be said: thank you thank you thank you for the development of traditional support (even if it's temporarily disappeared in other places), and thanks for adding English to the mouseovers in Advanced.

User29601, I had exactly the same thing happen to me, so you are not alone. All the lessons that had already been downloaded by my feed downloaded for a second time. In addition, I got lots of Newbie lessons that I had not requested on my feed. I had to go through and delete them by hand. Is this likely to happen again unless I disable my feed?

Also the dialogues for Olympic Marathon, Christmas Presents, Ordering Office Supplies and Olympic Mascots downloaded by my feed prior to the maintenance have never been usable. They run too fast at "chipmunk" speed. I have reported this before in an email. I was told I should download them again. Today I tried, but it seems that no dialogues are available for download on older lessons. For example, the first elementary lesson that has such downloads available is I can't buy my size. I don't know whether or not this is because of the scheduled maintenance. Will dialogues be available for all lessons after the maintenance, and will they all run at the correct speed?

I requested Qing Wen on my feed. However, it stopped downloading after To Finish Something Off. Will it be part of the feed again after the scheduled maintenance? Will I get all the ones I missed since To Finish Something Off?

Hi Guys,

I'm not really running "communications" here, but am happy to answer any questions from the tech side of the site since I have more visibility here than John does. The "scheduled migration" was a general site upgrade. It involved switching the backend system to 6 newer systems, both on the lesson preparation side as well as the user-interface side.

Issues with numeric pinyin and or missing traditional content (content presentation issues) are relatively minor and should be fixed within the week. The reason these sorts of errors haven't been fixed yet is not because we don't think they're important (they're obviously disruptive), but because of reports of more significant technical problems (RSS feeds not properly updating or being completely re-downloaded, IE users being unable to access the site, irregularities in the payment system).

Our most important priorities are making sure that people can (1) access the site, (2) access their RSS feeds, and (3) have conversations here. The biggest outstanding issue from my perspective is the vocabulary lists. We're maintaining a TODO list and problems go on it to be fixed as soon as they're reported. You guys have been great about providing feedback about what is and is not working. If anyone has questions feel free to ask here, start another discussion thread, or contact me by email.

I just added about 10 words to vocab from the Cpod dict....but not really. Guess that's not working. Painful.

artkho, We did indeed have a test version of the site before going live. Despite that, well... you know what happened. ladave, Sorry! You've been faithfully reviewing all semester, though right?? (Heh, sorry...) Phil, Good question. We will investigate. philip8, Your requests are reasonable, but since I'm not on the tech team, I'm not the best one to answer these types of questions. As soon as Dave has chance to take a breather, I'm sure he will have some things to say. Thanks, everybody, for being so nice and understanding! Believe us, we hate a buggy site too!

John's comment at 12:05 p is his usual and praiseworthy frank. One might add -- for the sake of the community-cloud, WHY it did not go as planned. Mebbe not the whole story, but enuff.

I'm not sure the clan wants/needs a DEFINITIVE list.

It might, however, benefit both cpod cred and user faith to know what in a) bugs b) changes c) features is going on in a') bugs, b') changes and c') features -- at a) present, b) with respect to the past and c) in terms of the future.

Even a little.

Just wondering why the Forum posts had dried up in my feedreader and found that the Forum RSS feed has changed to:

http://forum.chinesepod.com/rss.php

I am no longer able to add words to my vocabulary list. With my final exam only days away, this is unfortunate timing.

Perhaps for the next scheduled release, Cpod could make use of Amazon's services to bring up a pre-production copy of the release to iron out potential bugs. Another suggestion is to enlist the help of a group of Cpod users to test a new release before making it live.

goulniky,

The upgrade was certainly not supposed to take 72+ hours. As conceived, it was going to be barely noticeable, hence the name "scheduled maintenance." Despite extensive planning and testing, it did not go as planned.

We're really sorry about all the inconvenience. Bugs/changes/features are literally changing by the hour, which is why we haven't published a definitive list yet, but that is coming soon.

Exercise 3 in "Importance of Brains" is NOTfunctioning properly and smoothly.

I hope this comment helps the common cause after the program maintenance.

I'm very happy about simplified-only rollovers and tone marks. The vocab feature has been frustrating me for quite some time. It's very-high maintenance in working with folders and lists; I spend way too much time maintaining them to being on verge of abandoning that feature. I suspect folder and list maintenance areas aren't being improved.

I give very high marks for the other features, though. Cpod is a true leader. I'm willing to be long-term patient on upgrade periods except for not knowing what features were being upgraded.

Please keep traditional characters as a part of your overall curriculum. As someone once so eloquently said: with simplified characters one may read "Mao", but by knowing traditional characters one may read "what Mao read."

Thanks for all you do!

Take care,

Donald

AZERDocMom, at least we have you to take care of us. :-)

Ah....I feel better already. ;-)

Awww, sparechange. My poor sparechange...I feel your pain. Just hang on. All withdrawal eventually ends. It's not life-threatening, it won't kill you. It just feels crappy as all get out! Brew some nice ginger tea, steep it for a long time, put gobs of honey and juice of a whole lemon in it and let it's aroma and anti-emetic effect sooth your soul! There, there...you'll do just fine : )

Is there anything you can do for me, Doc?

It's the weekend now in Shanghai. I suspect there will be the usual dearth of admin communications which it brings. Our collective disappointment notwithstanding, it reflects how much we need CPod, how desperate we are without it. It's a true addiction. Can't get our fix the way we like it...we go into withdrawal; there's anger, anxiety, panic, tears, crying, nausea....sorry, too medical...

I also agree with goulniky, especially on (1). Knowing what to expect would help us to give more meaningful feedback. For all I know, my feedback up to this point may be like telling you the sky is blue...i.e. obvious, useless information.

It also might give us a little more patience since, like goulniky and others, I took "scheduled maintenance" to mean "a day or less." Phrases like "massive overhaul," "major upgrade," or "detonation of a low-yield nuclear device in our server room" might have been more appropriate for this situation.

I have to agree with Goulniky. You guys are making a huge public relations error here. CPod rescued me from isolated memorization and Pimsleur tapes and I wont forget it, but you have let us down a little. Its not the IT stuff - its the lack of communication.

John, what I think would help now is 1) a list of what *intentional* changes to expect (so we don't mistake features for glitches/bugs) and 2) a date by which CPod estimates the migration will be complete. If you could clarify what will change but also what won't, this would be of tremendous help.

I understand that under such pressures you all want to rush and get as much under control as possible. On the other hand, 1-2 hours of your time (or so.o. else's) won't have much impact on bug fixing, but will go a long way to reassure the user community.

Would someone mind confirming that the sample sentences on the dictionary currently do not work (appear) but they will be returning in due course?

PLEASE put the English translations back into the Expansion tab. Using this feature to check the accuracy of my translations from English to Chinese was ChinaPod's most useful learning tool for me, besides the Podcasts. At the very least, please put it back as an optional view.

please tell me if I'm rhw only one who has the problem i mentionned a few days ago: i still ave it:

Since your latest maintenance, all lessons I previously downloaded now appear a second time in my Podcast on iTunes. Plus lots of lessons I never bookmarked now show up on my podcast for some reason.You guys need to learn to test your software before putting it nto production

john: When you say simplified in the popups "by default," does that mean there will be an option to switch to traditional? IMO, that would make the most sense, as it would mirror the character functionality found in the Exercises section. My preference would be to have that option appear globally, so that a user could complete an entire lesson using either simplified or traditional. Once again, I'm no developer, and I have no idea the feasibility of such a function.

ok, thanks John. I'm still puzzled as to what this now 3-days "scheduled maintenance" really was, and even if it was a platform upgrade, why it should take so long. 3 hours, 6 hours even, but 72+ hours?!

I'm having trouble understanding the value of the 88groups.com content. It feels like the ad/link on CPod site is just taking up real estate that could be used for direct links to more helpful content within CPod itself (like Qing Wen, Ask Amber or even the IC stuff on the blog).

Don't worry, we are switching back to (1) pinyin with tone marks, (2) simplified only in popups by default.

Please, let's go back to pinyin with tone marks.

goulniky: travelyan told me earlier that they will be switching back to the pinyin with tone marks. I agree, the number style is more difficult to read.

It's weird that we're not even know what the intended changes are. We're picking them up as we go along and reporting them to everyone else.

tvan, I actually find this annoying, I'm perfectly happy with simplified and have no interest in picking up traditional! Also if I remember correctly the pinyin is now numbered which to me is much less readable, but that might have been a glitch

The rollover translation now includes traditional characters as well as the pinyin and English definitions. I don't believe that was there before. That's going to be a big help for me picking up simplified. Thanks!

AuntySue: I see what you're saying now. I was thinking more of general readability, rather than individual character study. I agree that an accurate representation of each component would be very important when studying the characters in-depth, particularly when learning to write.

sparechange, although size is important, the particular problem I mentioned with certain font styles cannot be fixed by larger font, because even when large the actual shapes of the components are wrong. For example within a character there might be a component that's like the shape of 八 , but the way it's drawn it looks definitely like the two strokes inside of 四 instead. There are even worse examples of misrepresented components but I can't recall or type them right now. When seeing that character for the first time (that meand every learner) there is no way to say oh they must have meant whatever but they're being fancy. You can only believe what's before your eyes, and with that crazy font, even at 64 point size, you'll get it wrong and learn it wrong.

With a good font, on the other hand, enlarging it helps to see the detail correctly.

Since your latest maintenance, all lessons I previously downloaded now appear a second time in my Podcast on iTunes. Plus lots of lessons I never bookmarked now show up on my podcast for some reason.You guys need to learn to test your software before putting it nto production.

For the podcasts since the maintenance, I'm not getting the traditional-character html files - only simplified. I guess this is just because the upgrade hasn't been totally finished yet, but I haven't noticed it mentioned anywhere.

On my Mac at home, in Safari, the font in the expansion section looks fine; however on my work PC, using Firefox, it's almost unreadable. Sorry I can't give you specs at the moment. Then again, I probably shouldn't be using ChinesePod when I'm there anyway.

the post-update html files need tidying up :

• missing lesson number
• numbered pinyin subtitles
• hanzi twice alongside vocab, no pinyin
• no vocab at all in one case

E006 Homepage is not updated, new lessons are not bookmarked

Just noticed:

C01 Font size in Exercises has been reduced

C02 Switching between Hanzi and Pinyin resets exercise

C03 new correction logic for Exercise #2.

I am not that happy with C02 as I always used the Pinyin-Hanzi-switch in Exercise #2 to check for correct pronounication.

Agreed that the font size of the characters in the exercises could be a bit larger. I find this section helpful, but difficult for a newbie like me to read and therefore not used enough.

Thanks

Could you also bring back the English translations for the expansion exercises? The roll over is not enough sometimes to grasp the meaning. Plus I use them in studying, seeing if can come up with the correct Chinese for the English sentence.

Can someone please explain the significance of 88 group to me. I'm on it through practice plan, but don't understand the need for the change. I have to sign into two sites now, 88 group and Chinesepod. It seems a little disjointed. Why did we need this? Will 88group be doing something special or different for us in the future?

odd, I posted a comment on the Sidney lesson at 01:16 CPod time through the m.chinesepod iinterface, at that point the last mobile comment was Amber's on early birds (this was today, hers was from yesterday). Mine appeared on mobile, but never seem to have made it here on the main website??

AuntySue: You make a good point. Maybe if they could just bump the size up a couple notches... On my screen, the characters in the Exercises are small enough that some of the thinner strokes start to disappear, and I have to strain to read them. The Exercises appear to be in Flash, which means I can't adjust the overall font size with my browser (which I can do in Dialogue and Expansion).

Maybe I'm just getting old. ;-)

Although I use simplified characters, I feel traditional support is a must.

Traditional characters! Yes please! Thank you!

The font needs to be something, like Kai for example, that allows people studying handwriting to recognise the character's components. It looks fine here so far, but beware. Some fonts, the plain squarish looking spaghetti-traced fonts, are so stylised that they are impossible to learners to grok deeply.

RE: Traditional Characters

I like them, but I think it depends on how they're implemented. I prefer the ability to switch from one to the other (as in the Exercises), although I realize this might not be as easy as it sounds.

On another note, the font used in the Exercises seems to have changed from Hei style to Kai style (i.e. sans-serif to serif). Kai's variable stroke-width makes it somewhat difficult to read at small sizes on screen.

I agree with sparechange that numbers are really a bad thing!

@sparechange - we'll be switching back to the old tonal style of pinyin. The academic team will be making the call on traditional characters, so if you guys like them (or hate them) be sure to let us know.

@ladave -- the iTunes feed issue should be fixed (tomorrow's lesson should publish as normal). We'll look into the account problem tomorrow as well. thx.

Hi

Just in case you don't have these on the bug list:

1.

Your Account section is overstating pending charges.

2.

My iTunes feed is not updating the new lessons.

Please let me know if you want screen shots.

Thanks.

Say it isn't so!!!!!! The roll-over translations for dialogue and expansion now use numbers (i.e. wade-giles) instead of tone marks (pinyin)! I hate the numbers with a glowing, red-hot passion. Please tell me that isn't a permanent feature....

Oops...just looked, the file size error has been fixed. (But then noticed in Amber's reply to it, her avatar no longer says "Admin".... so either another glitch, or we have one less Amber at CPod. :( Hope the former...)

I only noticed that the size of podcast files (at least when I was downloading the Internet Slang podcast files to share with my Advanced Oral class, which is studying that very topic) says 0Mb... so I guess that is a glitch of the update?

I Like the changes, just didnt expect this much from "Maintenance". Maybe I just have not been paying attention. The important thing is we got TaiPan's avatar back! Nice work Amber. :-)

a glitch I have noticed is when updating my profile (adding a photo) it says my email address is invalid when clearly it isnt. BTW my email address contains two hyphens,

lucky groups?

What's the significance of '88'?

88groups is pretty cool.

Ooh, I'm liking the traditional characters feature. Saying that, my feed seems to only list the newbie pods at the moment. I'm so glad that QW and DA are finally going to be part of the feeds now though!

嗯，E001 (comments sorting) seems to have been fixed, but the number of comments displayed is way off now ?!

Does that mean you get free spanish lessons if you have a ChinesePod subscription? ;)

Some of the vocab data still needs to be transferred along with comments for some of the older/extra content. We should have fixed most if not all of the file-access issues we've had reported. The major problem we've had relates to a cookie-related problems many Internet Explorer users have been having logging-in. The grammar guide is also temporarily offline, but will be coming back in a more flexible (and hopefully convenient) form.

A minor positive feature that should be useful is also unified authentication. All ChinesePod logins are now good at www.spanishpod.com and www.88groups.com.

hi henning and auntiesue,

Yes! everything will be back to normal soon, including missing data. It's all to do with the maintenance, and we are very sorry for any inconvenience!

These sorts of notes are really helpful after an update. It is my understanding, however, that the update is not yet complete. In particular, some of the data is still being transferred and is not available yet.

So anything related to missing data is probably because it simply hasn't arrived yet, wait and see.

Anything not involving data might still be affected by missing data, since the interactions under the hood can be complex.

The fact that they could get it up and running before all the data had been taken across is pretty miraculous and deserves a pat on the back. On the other hand, letting us think it's finished before it is finished, is not very helpful at all and would not save face, since reliability is more important than number of features.

After all of the data has been transferred and is settled in place and we get the "back to normal" signal, then we should make a fresh start with the bug-spotting and that should help a lot.

I'll be relying on that final reliable signal, too, to know when to turn my pod-catcher back on without re-downloading everything and swamping my feeble little net link. In the meantime, though, I'm just waiting it out, thankful that we can still access something and get some kinds of work done.