I’ve written our own poll system to replace the previous one we were trying. It’s accessible from China, it’s better styled, and it doesn’t even forget your vote every five seconds!
There will also soon be a page to view old polls, so you can learn more about your fellow Skritterers’ favorite Chinese tones and how many have sprung for the Wacom and stuff, even after the poll has changed.
We’re now opening the scratchpad up so that you don’t need to be logged in to use it. So go ahead and make links to sets of characters you want to reference (using the urlencoded URLs if you want IE to be able to open them). If you want to generate the links for integration into your site, though, please talk to us first.
I’ve recently caved and changed it so that the timer stops when you finish a prompt, until you start the next one. I haven’t crystallized the time tracking system into a gleaming power nugget yet, but maybe this will help for now. Let me know whether it works better for you. I’ve heard one suggestion to have it count a couple seconds after you finish a prompt, but I’m unswayed: what do you think?