I'm coming back to Skritter after a long hiatus. Is there any way to clear my word list without losing all my progress stats? I don't really have time to power through the thousands of reviews I have waiting for me, nor do I want the few hundred words I really care about right now to get lost in the clutter of all my old words, but I do want to preserve the old stats so that I'll have them as I gradually add words back in. Delete All doesn't seem to answer my needs because it doesn't preserve my stats and Save Me doesn't really help because I still have to get through all those old reviews and would still lost the words I care about most in the sea of old words. I realize that by skipping all the old reviews my knowledge from before will continue to degrade and I'm ok with that. Any advice on how to clear out my word list so I can rebuild it with more focus without losing my progress would be welcome.

When I came back after nearly 7 months without studying, I used the "save me" button and spread them out over 365 days. So the words I learned before will eventually come up, but I can keep up with new words.

I would say that this isn't the best, b/c some days I just want to review all of the oldies, but they are maybe months away from coming up again.

I've just come back after 3 months and had over 4,000 reviews. I'm ploughing through!

Way to go Bennyboyk!

One thing you could do is go through the reviews and liberally ban words that are not important and that you don't immediately remember. That way the ones you still remember stay in your schedule, but the ones that would actually take more time to re-learn right now than would be helpful, you kick them out of the way for the time being. Later on when you've got more of a handle on your studies, you can go to the banned words page (under the my words tab) and add back ones you'd like to work on again.

Thx @Scott - good idea. Also, studying single lists to ensure that all the words I care about most get added quickly to my rotation seems to be helping. A thought about banned words: it would be great if I were notified when building a new list if a word I added to it was banned and/or when picking a new premade/published list if it contains words I've banned. It seems to me that the time I'm most likely to want to unban words is when they are part of a new list I'm building/adding. I'd love to see if the list I'm building/adding has banned words and to quickly and easily be able to review them and unban those I want to study again.

@dorritg - I think everything you've asked for has been built! You know how the flash notifies you when a word is added? It notifies you when a banned word has been skipped in the same way. And if you go to a section of a list (click the contents tab on the list's page) you can see all the words you have banned fill out on the right. Hmm, though actually now that I look at it, it's not very good if you don't have all the progress columns showing (click 'more' in the upper right). I'll tweak that to make it show a banned icon where the green circle is if you're viewing the simple progress column.

:) I'm glad this topic was started. I'll be gone for a few months and I was just thinking to myself; How am I going to get back into things when I come back?

I just 'started over' by starting over and was gradually building my vocab back up but now I have to go again. Ah well, these are all great ideas.

So what I actually ended up doing was going through every list I've ever added words from section by section and banning all the words. Then I picked the list I actually wanted to start studying from again and went in and unbanned all the words on that list. This achieves my objective of getting rid of all outstanding words to review without getting rid of the progress data, but was pretty painful and time consuming. I'd love to have a "ban all" as an alternative to "delete all".

Hmm, it sounds like there were two ways that would have achieved your goal that would have been faster. Both from this page, the study nav:

www.skritter.com/study

1. Remove lists from study. On the study nav, you can click the 'x' on the right side of any list and remove its words from study. So if there were a particular list you didn't want to catch up on first, you could have removed that one and focused on the others. Then later you could have re-added the list, basically picking up where you left off on those words.

2. Study one list at a time. Sounds like this is closer to what you want, or ended up doing anyway. You can study a single list at a time, by clicking 'study single list', or by clicking the name of the list and then clicking 'study list' on that page.

I think that would have been a lot faster than going through each list and banning individual items. Banning is *not* meant or designed for large scale use. I was suggesting using it for individual words of particular trickiness, not whole lists. If something doesn't seem to be a very efficient way to go, check with us, there's probably a better way, or we need to know in order to build a better way :) Or we need to make options like these clearer. Did you know you could do either of those things, studying single lists or removing whole lists from study and add them back?

I know about studying single lists, but it doesn't necessarily achieve what I want. I may want to make lots of lists, adding back words to my reviews only as I encounter them on one of my new lists. If I want to be able to simultaneously review all the words from all my new lists, while reviewing only those words from my old lists that are also on my new lists. I don't want to lose my progress on words that were on my new lists, because I'll eventually add most of them back to what I want to study.

It looks like removing lists is exactly what I want. I just totally overlooked that capability. I think maybe the link to stop adding/restart adding captured my eye and I didn't even notice the x's to the far right for deleting. I wonder if a simple change such as putting them in red rather pale blue would have helped me spot them.

We have a better remove button than that. I'll get it replaced. Thanks for the insight!

Hmm, I might have to start rocking the ban button myself. I did a 30 day Save Me from about 3k reviews, but then I slacked off for a few days and I'm back up to 1,000+. I've still got a bunch of words that I added during that May Madness but never really learned or used, so I might have to start kicking them out. For some reason I never thought it would be so easy to remove them from the banned list when the time came. Silly me.