I have two suggestions, which aren't related to each other at all, but since I've been told not to start too many threads, I'm doing a two-in-one.

The first one is about the history blurbs on the bottom of the Skritter home page. I go to read these on a regular basis and I've noticed that most of them are of the same nature: Mao ZeDong, WWII, Communist Party this and that, Chiang Kai Chek, etc. We're talking about China, here. The country that boasts 5000 plus years of civilization and one of the richest histories in the world. There's got to be tons of stuff that are far more interesting. Of course, I realize that Mao had a huge effect on China, but so did previous leaders and there's more to learn about than leadership/government anyway.

The second thing is about hiding the English when practicing tones(only). When we practice tones, the characters are shown to us and we have to enter the character's tone. I've noticed that a lot of times, I'll look at a character and then peek at the English definition, which will make me remember the Chinese translation, which will then make it easier for me to input the tone. So basically, instead of practicing being able to recognize a character and input its tone, a lot of times I just look right over to the English and see something like "difficult" and then automatically think "that's nan2 in Chinese" and then input 2nd tone. The problem is that I might have actually not been able to recognize the character 難, or mistook it for another word/character had I not been able to see what the character means in English. So I really think that being able to hide the English while practicing tones would be great.
I've tried making the page smaller/etc, but sometimes I want to be able to read the example sentences/etc, so I think that if we could choose "hide English" in the settings, that would solve this problem.

In response to the first one, I suspect that the exact dates of most of Chinese history are rather sketchy. Since the history blurbs seem to be "on this day in history" sort of stuff, there's probably not much available if you go back before about 1900...

First idea is good, I like to read all of the history bits and anything extra is always interesting to me.

For the second idea, how about the English is hidden, but with the option to show the word, just as you can choose to show a mnemonic or pinyin against a character now, but it is hidden by default?
As a second option / suggestion, how about showing the English when the repetition rate is below a certain time and then hide it above that time. Therefore, when a word is new and unknown, you get the English hint, but when you know it, the reminder hides (but can be un-hidden) so you lose the 'easy' prompt. No idea how easy these would be to implement!

I think the hiding of English is entirely unnecessary. Firstly, a large number of tones are already done after writing the character, which would leave it moot, and secondly is it really such a bad thing to associate tone with meaning? Eventually it'll all come together anyway.

@Byzanti The characters wouldn't be written if studying tones only. And besides that, if the study mode is set to "writing and tones" , sometimes there are it only prompts you to enter the character's tone.

There's nothing wrong with making associations, but there is something wrong if a person who wants to learn Chinese can't really read/recognize characters.

@HappyBlue Thanks for the support. Yeah, your ideas are also cool, but lets just hope the Skritter guys decide do do this in any shape or form. If we make too many requests, they might not get interested in any of it

@FatDragon This is true, good point.

These histories are the best we could find when assembling our "On this day..." lists without spending forever on it. If anyone wants to assemble more quirky and less "Mao Mao'd in the Mao" histories, we'd be glad to put them up. There's also a set for Japanese that is similar.

I would guess that for tones, the association to definition is more useful than association to the character, since it's a better unit of tonal disambiguation than a character. I see your point, though. Hmm. What do others think?

@Nick I'm sure that some people may prefer to always be able to see the English, especially those who have only been studying for a handful of years or less, but those of us who have been studying for the better part of a decade or more need to find new ways to challenge ourselves, especially in terms of simulating a "real life" study method. In a real life situation, we usually only see one language at a time.

The cool thing about studing "tones only", from time to time, is not only do we get to practice our tones, but we also get to practice reading characters(so we're not just practicing tones). If we can also see the English, though, that takes away from it because it will definitely affect how well we're able to read Chinese by itself.

Being able to choose "Hide English" in the study settings would make everyone happy!

I like the idea of Japanese history blurbs being thrown into the mix. I admit that I rarely read them, though.