Upset with speed of updates.
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Hello,
I hope this message finds you well. I wanted to share some feedback regarding the lifetime subscription I purchased for your service. I was expecting the service to be integrated within Anki, as I believe many of your users are language learners who are already familiar with Anki and are looking for an all-in-one Anki add-on.
It seems that the development focus has shifted away from Anki users and towards your own app, which personally I did not request nor have any interest in. As a user of your service, I am more interested in a robust add-on for Anki that provides timely updates and focuses on enhancing the add-on's functionality.
I also noticed that the implementation of Migaku into Firefox, which was planned over a year ago, has not been realized. Additionally, the current version of your software does not work with the latest version of Anki, while there are forks developed by single developers that do. As an Anki user, I prefer to have all my notes, including biology and math, in one place along with my language studies, and to have access to the wide range of add-ons and support from the Anki community.
I understand that you may have other ventures and third-party software in development, but as a paying customer, I would appreciate if the primary focus could be on supporting the Anki add-on. I paid for the lifetime subscription with the understanding that I would receive continued support for the add-on, not for other ventures.
I would like to kindly request a refund for my purchase, as the current direction and focus of the service does not align with my expectations. I value the community-driven and highly customizable approach of Anki, and I believe that this is what sets it apart and makes it the preferred choice for many language learners.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Best,
James -
@anon-pm
Don't worry I understand those concerns. We are well aware of of those problems too. Be it communication, speed of updates or similar. And obviously also the concerns regarding Anki.
Hopfully we can leave those behind with the reworked-extension and once this current phase is over
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@stevimigaku thanks I appreciate the prompt and detailed response on this. I am not a part of the Discord, nor was I aware that dev engagement with the community was was much higher over there. Although I much prefer the forums due to indexability, I will make a note to check discord more often for up-to-date communication from the team. I understand that you and your team are working hard to make Migaku great despite being a small team. I hope you understand that my concerns are voiced out of appreciation for the product and consequently not wanting it to depart too far from its roots that made it great rather than out of contempt.
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@anon-pm
"People have had concerns about the future of Anki support for a while and it hasn't really been addressed. "I don't know if you are in our Discord or not, but this has been adressed multiple times and in many posts. Yes, we will continue to support Anki.
The reason the roadmap is currently not visible is that a lot shifted here, due to some changes in the team and as we are currently in kind of a transition period we can't give exact roadmaps. We will add it again once this shift is over thought.
We are also painfully aware that our responses are often pretty slow. We are a small team and are constantly putting in a lot of effort working on this project. We do try to improve things and if possible also want to hire a community manger/support in the future. The forum often ends up getting a bit neglected, but we are much more active on Discord. So if you are not on Discord yet, I do recommend that you join.
As for whether we asked to community or not, we got a lot of feedback. From users and from test users and our drop off just in the test period is extremely high, due to the difficulties of using and setting up the extension. Which is in part due to the extension itself, but also due to how Anki works, which is something we cannot change. As I said in the previous post, there isn't that much more that can be done in Anki itself to make improvements. Most of those will come in the extension, which is currently being worked on with the reworked extension. That is why there is no mention of Anki in the roadmap above. A lot of what is mentioned on there are improvments to the extension itself (parsing improvements, new streaming site support, etc.). And the next ones are for the mobile app, which a ton of people have asked for as it would just allow to use the same features on mobile. Migaku OCR is independent of any SRS as it will probably be a standalone at first and then integrated into the extension (although the OCR had to be moved back a bit). The catalog as well is independent from Anki or our SRS as it will be a way to filter for shows, books etc. based on your known words.
As for the improvements that can't be done in Anki, just to name some:
- Instand learning status updates
- Leech handling
- How card learning works (eg. our SRS automatically allows for batch learning)
- Repping in the browser extension
- Card count and direct access in the pop up
Again, we are sorry for the current lack of updates (although we just posted one on discord for the extension). The big thing that is currently in the works is the reworked extension as the current one just has a lot of problems as it never was intended to grow that big. A lot of groundwork had to be layed in the background. But I am not the best person to ask this as I am not a programmer. If you are curious you can ping "Saxon" on Discord he can tell you a bit about it.
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@stevimigaku I think the point that OP is trying to make is that Migaku seems to be heading down a route of making its own SRS which has seemingly sucked resources away from refining the existing Migaku product. Community engagement seems pretty low and turnaround times to get an actual response from the dev team seems like forever (devs literally respond after months). People have had concerns about the future of Anki support for a while and it hasn't really been addressed. In fact, nobody can even see the roadmap anymore because the content is being blocked when trying to render in an iFrame due to a site error (the direct link to the Trello page can be found here for anyone interested btw.
For a lot of people Anki is just too much to get into and our SRS will allow those people to get the same benefits but with less hassle.
This statement is potentially true in isolation, but how true is it for your customer base? Have you asked your community whether or not they'd prefer a Migaku-specific solution over Anki? I have a sneaking suspicion that most of your community belongs to a demographic that has no problem using Anki would not want to use a new SRS since switching between SRS tools has a pretty steep cost associated. Additionally, most SRS-as-a-service offerings lock you into their system so that you don't switch back to things like Anki.
OP raised a valid point when they asked whether or not you've even asked your customers what they want. You mentioned that all the ideas you have for improving the SRS experience aren't doable in Anki, but nobody here even knows what those ideas are. You have people that have paid for an existing product under the impression that it would be a part of the Anki ecosystem long-term and yet the funding is going to things people didn't ask for rather than the things that people paid for.
Looking at the roadmap with the direct link I provided above there is not a single mention of the word Anki. Most of the focus seems to be directed towards developing new things rather than improving the existing ones. Given that there is a slow dev-response time and that updates take seemingly forever, it calls into question how the team will be able to support all of the existing stuff as well as the new stuff given that the dev team seems very small, stretched thin, and likely working on this project out of passion in their part time rather than as a full-time job.
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@jlangeblom
I think most of whats in store for Anki in terms of development is mostly bug fixes as all the ideas we have for improving the SRS experience for users are not possible with Anki. But that is outside of my expertise as I am not a developer.I think most of the improvements in terms of usability for the current users can be gained with improvments to the browser extension. And the work on the re-worked extension is in full swing, with a lot of improvments to sentence detection, parsing and what not. Thats mostly the stuff we posted in the #project-updats channel.
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@stevimigaku Hi,
Thank you for your response. I'm aware of your intentions to not abandon Anki. A shift in focus of development towards your app is what was mentioned sorry for the confusion in my writing.
I appreciate your efforts in expanding your company to other ventures. However, as an observer and user, I notice that the core product is not functioning optimally yet. There are issues with the compatibility and performance of your migaku software and Anki which is your core product. I believe it would benefit from further attention and refinement to ensure a smoother user experience. As this is where your customer base would be primarily concerned. And can only be done by focusing all your small teams efforts on the one winning ticket you currently have. Please note that I am offering this feedback with the utmost respect and goodwill.
I think before expanding into other ventures your core product, being the anki addon + extension to browsers should be your primary and only focus.
Have you asked your community in a poll what they want? I think it would be revealing if you asked "Would you like us to focus our efforts on making the anki extension better?" or "Split our focus between our SRS and Anki?"
I agree for a lot of people Anki is too much to get into, but this is a whole other market, this is people who aren't familiar or aware of immersion studying and Anki, which should be focused on way further down the line. For now you should be focused on your core customer base, and then focus on expanding your consumers with other ventures later once you have a fully working product.
I must be mistaken regarding firefox i thought i read it in discord somewhere.
Unfortunately not it's passed two weeks.
Thanks
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@jlangeblom
We are really sorry about all the delays with the update for Anki. The update to the newest version is being worked on. We are not abandoning Anki as we said multiple times in the past, we will have the two options of using Anki or our SRS. For a lot of people Anki is just too much to get into and our SRS will allow those people to get the same benefits but with less hassle. There are also things we just can't do with Anki.As for the Firefox version of the browser extension, we never made any promises as to when we will be able to do this. Our stance has always been that we want to eventually export to other browsers beside Chromium based ones, but no time commitment as to when. For now, supporting multiple browsers is just not feasible for a small team like ours.
If you purchased lifetime in the last two weeks, you can send an email to contact@migaku.io
