Changes after the update

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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!

88groups is pretty cool.

What's the significance of '88'?

lucky groups?

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,

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!

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?

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...)

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....

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.

@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.

@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.

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

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 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. :-)