posted by ani.ka on June 9, 2012 | 15 comments
Hello!I recently found this website and I must say that so far I really like it.But now I realized something that is giving me some trouble. While I was browsing through your podcasts I clicked on some topics that are still too difficult for my limited Chinese ability. Since then the words from those lessons always appear when I review my vocabulary. So I tried deleting the words from my vocabulary list (that worked) and to mark the lessons as unstudied. The problem is that every time I come back to my lessons page they are marked as studied and the vocabulary shows up when I click on review in the study center.So I was wondering whether this is a bug or due to the fact that I currently have a free account. I really hope you can help me with my problem.Ani
Noah.Pflugradt on June 9, 2012 | reply
You are probably suffering from the automatic "mark as studied" that happens as soon as you visit the lesson vocab page or something.Instead try to mark the lessons as "unstudied" on this page:http://popupchinese.com/lessonsSelect "studied lessons", and then move the mouse over the lesson. Then a link shows up to mark the lesson as unstudied. Noah
Thanks for your answer. But I have actually already tried that with the same result. The lessons disappear from the list after clicking on the link but when I refresh the page they are back again.
murrayjames on June 9, 2012 | reply
ani.ka,On the lesson page itself, above the lesson picture (right-hand side of the page), do you see the words "mark as unstudied" in light grey? I have this text on every single lesson page. Not sure if it's a premium feature.If you can see the text, click on it to unstudy the lesson.
Yes, there is the light grey link above the lesson picture. But when in click on it nothing happens. And as I already mentioned I also cannot mark lessons as not studied from the studied lessons list, although I can see the link there as well.That's why I think this might be a bug.
@ani.ka,Can you try what Craigrut suggests below? Everything should be working (there's no difference between the free and the paid accounts here). What should happen is that clicking on the link in the lesson list should cause that lesson to disappear in a funky animation. Clicking on the link ON the lesson page should cause the lesson page itself to disappear.If this isn't working for you, can you let us know your OS and browser so we can test locally on this side? I suppose it's possible that there is a problem here, but it would be strange since we haven't heard of it yet and it should just be a link....Best,--david
@David,I tried both possibilities to mark lessons as not studied again with the same result I have already mentioned. I have the feeling that when I click on the link on the specific lesson's page that the lesson is instantly marked as studied again. I tried this a few times and after clicking on "mark as unstudied" sometimes the little window that asks you to review vocabulary when you click on a lesson appears - and the lesson is still in my studied lessons list. When I click the link to remove lessons in that list it first disappears like it should but I come back to the studied lessons page it is there again.My OS is Windows 7 Professional and my browser is Firefox 13.0. Thank you for having a look at this issue.Ani
Hi Ani.ka,In my experience, once you click the link on the specific lesson page, nothing 'appears' to happen on the page. However, if you bounce back to the lesson list and refresh it, it should drop the lesson from your 'studied' list.I had the same issue previously but noticed the lesson is actually removed (at least for me) when I click the link, it just doesn't show up as removed on that specific page.Craig
hikari.reika on July 15, 2012 | reply
I'm having the same problem. Clicking "[mark as not studied]" in http://popupchinese.com/lessons?show=studied and "mark as unstudied (grey text)" in individual lesson pages don't seem to work.I have even cleared my cache, nothing seems to work.I'm running Windows 7 64-bit.Tried it on Chrome 20.0.1132.57 and Firefox 11.0.
hikari.reika on July 15, 2012 | reply
Huh! I found out something. I was at popupchinese.com and deleted the same lessons, and it finally disappeared from my "studied" list. Weird!
How did you manage to delete the lessons? I also tried emptying my cache but no matter on which link I click to delete lessons, they still show up when I refresh the page.
hikari.reika on July 16, 2012 | reply
@ani.ka
You go to popupchinese.com (the homepage. click the Popup Chinese logo on the top-left of any page to go there) and find your lessons that you want deleted from your studied list, and click the [X] button on the top-right of the entry.
I found that this was the only way I could get it to be deleted from my studied list :x
Can anyone else using Windows confirm having these problems? Switching lesson status works for me with Firefox and Safari no problem. iPad works as well, although it requires a double-tap on the links in the lesson lists.
Just to comment on the deletion functionality -- right now it is possible to delete lessons from your account in two ways: (1) using the checkboxes on the lesson archive page to remove an entire series, or (2) scroll back through the front page and click on the "close" button that appears on the teaser/intro for individual lessons.
hikari.reika on July 16, 2012 | reply
@trevelyanThe first one doesn't work for me for some reason. For example, I have "KTV Wednesday Jay Chow - Seven Mile Fragrance" on my studied list and if I remove the checkbox for KTV Wednesday and click "update my subscriptions", the entry is still there. Is this what you mean?The the second method is the only way I could remove lessons from my studied list.I've tested this problem on another machine (my work comp, totally different IP) and the problem is still there, although it's running Windows 64-bit and Chrome 20.0.1132.57 as well.I suspect it's not a browser/OS issue but an account/database issue...?
Ahh, yes... toggling the checkbox will only remove UNSTUDIED lessons from your account. So if a lesson is in your studied list we won't purge it automatically just because you advance to a higher level.
That said... I'm really not sure why we are getting these reported problems, especially since the link in question (on the lesson page) is a simple HTML link that should take you to a separate page which tells our server to change the lesson status and then redirects you back to the original page. So there is no javascript that can break across browsers or anything like that. If it works for everyone else it SHOULD work for you.
The only thing I can think of is that perhaps you are behind an ISP that is caching web data? If this is the case the second or third time you request the same URL you will get stale data from your ISP, because the request is never routed to us. If this is the case, one way to debug it is to change the URL of the page the second or third time you load it to include an arbitrary subdomain (i.e. "sjgks.popupchinese.com") and then manually refresh the page. Our server redirects meaningless subdomains to our main site, but the different URL should force your ISP to download the page afresh. If you can see the change in lesson status on the newly downloaded page then it can be confirmed to be a cache issue.