I notice there are a ton of new lists up recently. It's great, people are putting in vocabulary from their own text books and making them available to others.

It's too bad, though, that most of them don't say what book the characters are from. It would really increase the usability of the lists and decrease the clutter on the custom list page if we all knew what lists were from which text book.

Maybe you can add a 'book title' feild on the input page or just include something about it in the prompt before publishing.

Thanks to everyone that is publishing custom lists. I think it's awesome we can share what we're learning here on skritter.

Agreed. Custom list sharing is a great idea, but I also noticed a bunch of lists that I would never have any idea what they are about. Not really the developers fault, but at least encouraged me to be clear as possible if/when publishing my own.

None of my custom lists are from a book.

I guess there are at least four types of lists:

- Frequency-based (thanks for those)
- Association-based (clothes, colours, etc)
- Character-type-based (1-5 strokes, radicals, component-associated)

- Books and other context material

jww1066, Bodin, don't get me wrong. I've used many custom lists others have published that aren't books. Thanks to those who have created them. Most or all have very self explanatory list names.

My comment is only refering to those working hard at publishing lists, but forgetting to make their contents easily understood by others. I think a simple reminder near the List Name input area should be plenty.

Also, I know the Skritter guys can use our custom lists as the backbone for making the official book list available. I think we all want to see this site get bigger and better. Why not help them out by tagging our lists. Before you know it, they'll have more lists, more customers, and, for sure, more of the same awesome features.

Thomas,

No worries, I agree that the "Custom Lists" list is getting long and chaotic. I think there are a couple of larger problems:

1. There is no capacity to add to or edit a custom list once it has been published. I think this may be due to backend limitations.
2. There is no capacity to sort or search the list of custom lists; it only orders by creation date.
3. There is no capacity to tag or otherwise categorize custom lists. This goes along with item 2.

I think a simple proposal which would take care of items 2 and 3 would be to allow people to tag their custom lists using a list of text tags (like Flickr and many other sites do). This would allow us to organize the lists by textbook and Bodin's categories, for example. Another desirable sort/search criterion would be the user who created the list.

James

Sorry to join the discussion so late guys. I definitely agree with you Thomas that the system could be significantly improved without a heck of a lot of effort on our end. We had always intended to make the Custom Lists more easily browse-able, but we've just been focusing on other projects.

I like your suggestion about tags James. Until the custom list section of the site becomes much larger, we'd like to avoid implementing a search function since good search is such a tough problem.

So here are a few suggestions for you guys.

1) What do you guys think of a tag system as an organizational method to act as a stopgap until search makes sense? We were envisioning a system where anyone can tag a list, tags are user-created, and you can sort the content based on the tags. So for instance, the top of the page displays the available tags, and clicking on them filters the list. We would consolidate similar tags (say for instance somebody entered "Textbooks" and "Text books," we would merge the two to make sure tags don't get fractured and lists don't get buried). One of the obvious tags would be "Newly Created" so that people can just see what's recent.

2) We briefly discussed a modification to the publishing system that would enable adding to published lists. The reason we lock published lists from editing is to keep the vocabulary system to a manageable level of complexity on the back end. However, what we could do in the future is let people continue to add to already published lists. Would that be helpful?

It would be great to be able to add to existing lists. I have a list which has been in "Draft" mode for about a month because I don't want to publish it until it's ready, and I don't want to publish it in dribs and drabs. If I could publish it as it is, then add to it later, people could start using it now.

James

Adding to an already published list would be very helpful.

I recently finalized the input of my character and word sections Swedish textbook, but waited with the processing and publishing until I entered all 29 chapters as individual sections.

I'm in the process of entering all the characters from Heisigs "Remembering Simplified Hanzi 1", but if I cannot add sections on the way, it won't be published until I'm done with all 1500.

Yep, it'd be great to be able to add to custom lists. I'm too much of a completionist to publish bits and pieces of a textbook's vocabulary...

By the way, Bodin, Maksym got us a digital copy of RTH1 Simp and RTH1 Trad, so we're going to put up those two lists officially soon, if you want to save some work.

正好! 谢谢你。

Then I can skip the forthcoming proofreading, which I didn't really was looking forward to.

Yes! Please make it so I can edit published lists. I have one I made, but realized I wanted to add one more "section" to it. Now it seems I can't. :( And I definitely don't want to delete all of my hard work.

I have more lists I want to publish, but haven't for the reasons already mentioned. Please make an edit option!