Been having a problem the last day or so with a lag between characters in the Flash window. Does this sound familiar to anyone?

The next character will take a long time to load, and sometimes will never load at all. When I then navigate away from the Practice page, then go back to Practice, it gives me all the same words again (same characters I just practiced, in the same order, and labels the same ones as "new" when I've already just practiced them at least once).

I know it's not a problem of lack of words to load. My queue of new words is rather long, and the green bar says there are over 40 words waiting.

Any solutions?

I get this occasionally though it usually means my internet connection has died yet again.

It sounds like a connection problem. Unfortunately, right now we don't have an indicator to tell you when you're losing connection with the server. It just keeps retrying for several minutes to save your data and then gives up.

If you lose connection, you can finish the four words you have preloaded, but their reviews won't be saved. So you don't lose more data than that, but it's still annoying.

We're planning on adding an indicator in the future to warn of connection problems and that you should leave the page open until connection is reestablished so that it can sync reviews and load more words. Sound good?

If you're able to navigate to other pages on the Skritter site, though, it may not be that you've lost connection, but that the connection is spotty. Yesterday we had a lot of errors and timeouts from our server at Google, which would cause similar issues but less predictably. Not much to do about that except hope they keep improving and making lag spikes rarer.

By the way, the green bar shows how many words have been added today. The blue bar is the one showing how many words are due for review (though you can usually study more than that, as you'll start getting ones that are just about due for review).