Cloze-Collections Reviews Exceed Number Of Questions, Weird Points, Etc

[LuciusVorenusX]

@Mike There seems to be something weird happening with Cloze-Collections at the moment.

For a start there’s the inability to permanently remove a Cloze Collection which is discussed in this thread, so I won’t rehash that one here.

(In my case it was the French from English collection “French Verb “Vouloir”” that I tried to delete.)

However when I went to play my (personally created, French from English) collection " Greetings And Farewells", that’s when things got a bit strange. I started to see some questions more than once. For a moment I thought that I may have doubled up on some clozes but no, when I went to check on a different computer there were only 16 questions with no duplications. And by that time I was up to 20 question reviewed on the original computer.

20. Out of 16. How is that possible?

I thought that it may have had something to do with the review cycle which I haven’t customised in French yet, which showed “0 days” for 25% reviews BUT one of the duplicated questions that I saw is currently at 75%. So even had it started the day at 25%, when it hit 50% it should have been waiting for another 10 days before the next review to 75% came along.

And this collection hasn’t even EXISTED for 10 days yet.

Then I noticed something else. I rarely ever use multiple choice. However I do use voice input to type the entry in. In the example shown below one question went to 100% mastered (again, HOW??? given that the collection hasn’t been around long enough for ANY questions to reach 100% mastery based on the review cycle), yet… I got only 16 points for 100% mastery, not 32. Has input by voice been discounted? If so, why, since that’s harder than typing it in anyway since you need to get the pronunciation right. (Indeed it is sheer agony in French where you can have different spellings for words which are essentially pronounced the same way. If anything bashing your head against THAT wall should get you bonus points.)

I think something is amiss, which may or may not be connected to the “fuzzy” change.

[LuciusVorenusX]

Further clarification: This isn’t with reviews as such. I’m not seeing any “reviews” available for the collection, which makes sense as they aren’t yet due.

What is happening is that I appear to be able to “Play” my custom collections (at least the two that I’ve created so far in French) infinitely. With " Greetings And Farewells" for example, I reach the last cloze of the collection as shown below. There are 16 in the collection so far, and I’ve just done all 16:

I then move onto the summary page as usual:

This shows 16 “reviewed”, even though there were actually none in the review queue…

Now what would NORMALLY happen when I hit the [Continue] button is for the intensely annoying crying Pikachu to appear. But it doesn’t. Instead the collection starts back at the first question again (or A first question; the order is randomised):

Honestly I’m not even sure whether this is a bug or a feature. It gets rid of Crying Pikachu (YAY!), and it means that I can just run over the questions as many times as I want without waiting for their review date to come up (YAY!). On the down side, when I do so I’m so low on the scale in French that it doesn’t take much to level up. and when I was in this infinite loop, EVVVVEEERRY TIME I levelled up this morning I got the same video clip. That would be great if it was Green Tie Guy, Maverick or Jackie Chan, but it was {grind teeth} the Stephen Colbert one. (Seriously, this suggests that some kind of unexpected non-terminating loop is happening.)

Also on the down side, it makes the [Continue] button like Forest Gump’s box of chocolates; you never know what you’re going to get, the annoying crying Pikachu, or the set of questions from the start again.

I’ve always been of the view that having such a large UI distinction between reviews and playing a collection is not a great thing, so I can’t really complain that this allows me to play the questions whenever I want, as many times as I want… but I think it would still be better if it was consistent for all custom collections in all languages.

[mike]

Thanks for the detailed report and sorry for the trouble! We’ll need some time to dig into everything. Will post back with updates.

[mike]

@LuciusVorenusX

What is happening is that I appear to be able to “Play” my custom collections (at least the two that I’ve created so far in French) infinitely.

@LuciusVorenusX

I’m not even sure whether this is a bug or a feature.

That does seem to be what is happening - the way it’s implemented at the moment is that collections are always playable. If there are no more new sentences and no more sentences ready for review, then sentences not yet ready for review are included. If a sentence is played before it’s ready for review, it gets half points.

It’s a bug in the sense that it hasn’t really been well thought through yet - what should happen when there are no more new sentences and no sentences ready for review? Should you still be able to play that collection? The current implementation was a quick “sure why not”, but could be improved. Apologies as well that it’s not clear what’s happening, the explanations/UX could be improved here too.

Perhaps some sort of notice should be shown when there are no more new + no more ready for review, with an option to continue playing random sentences without scoring points or affecting next review dates to allow for 1) continuous play and 2) without seeing the leveled up a bunch / messing with review intervals.

Curious to hear what you or anyone else thinks.

@LuciusVorenusX

but I think it would still be better if it was consistent for all custom collections in all languages.

To be sure, what inconsistencies in which languages/collections are you seeing? And when / for which are you seeing the crying Pikachu?

Thanks again for raising this issue and all the info!

[LuciusVorenusX]

Hi @mike , sorry for the delayed reply, I’ve been a bit busy this week.

@mike

That does seem to be what is happening - the way it’s implemented at the moment is that collections are always playable.

Interesting… but that’s never been my experience outside of the two collections that I’ve created in French. (See below.)

@mike

If there are no more new sentences and no more sentences ready for review, then sentences not yet ready for review are included. If a sentence is played before it’s ready for review, it gets half points.

It’s a bug in the sense that it hasn’t really been well thought through yet - what should happen when there are no more new sentences and no sentences ready for review? Should you still be able to play that collection? The current implementation was a quick “sure why not”,

For mine, I’m fine with that as long as it’s consistent.

@mike

with an option to continue playing random sentences without scoring points or affecting next review dates to allow for 1) continuous play and 2) without seeing the leveled up a bunch / messing with review intervals.

Half points I have no issue with, no points I think would be a bit demotivating since, like the two points for favourites, it feels like it’s being punished for practicing. “Random” I don’t care for since I use a lot of sequential repetition so I’d rather that the order specified for the collection be respected (whether that be “random” or “in order”). Not messing with the review date I like the sound of. It just provides an additional way of reviewing when you feel the need without having to wait for reviews to come up.

@mike

To be sure, what inconsistencies in which languages/collections are you seeing? And when / for which are you seeing the crying Pikachu?

Let me give you but two examples, and I’ll make this “like for like”. The French collections where I can play indefinitely (" Transport And Movement" and Greetings And Farewells) are NOT built in; I created them specifically to practice specific parts of language. Similarly all of the questions in them are ones that I created manually; they weren’t copied from other Clozemaster collections.

In German I have a number which are the same; created by me, and not populated with clozes that are from the standard Clozemaster collections but rather ones which I created manually from my German textbooks. An example is " Reactions", " Reactions to questions, statements or events".

Now let’s see what happens when I try to play THAT collection:

I select [Play], then select the method of playing:

And when I hit [Go], I get…

I think this is why crying Pikachu annoys me so much. It’s not the .gif itself which is inoffensive enough, it’s the fact that every time I see it it’s because I’ve wasted time going through menus that take me nowhere.

Let’s see another example of that. I’ll switch over to Chrome to show that this is not browser-specific (and also because I prefer to play these collections by speaking.) I’ll reset the collection " German Language Europe" so that I’ll definitely have questions to play:

Note that there are only 9 sentences in this collection so far, but I’ve chosen to play 50. This will (correctly) limit me to 9 questions. This is consistent with my French collections:

I get to the 9th question and I see 9 played, 0 to go which is all as expected:

And then I see the Round Completed dialog, just as I do in one of my French collections:

BUT!

In French if I hit the [Continue] button I keep playing the collection over and over again. But in German (and every other collection I’ve ever played before starting the French one), THIS happens:

To make sure that this wasn’t something that had changed recently I created another new manual collection in German ( Ordering Food) and… same thing. I could play it once, and once ONLY. After that, I’d get a visit from crying Pikachu.

[mike]

Thanks for the thorough reply! We’ll need a bit of time to check it all out and will report back.