By random chance, I happened to notice that a character I added yesterday and was just cramming was banned at some point.

So, if I didn't happen to notice that and unban the item just now, I would assume that all the words in that list would be added to my queue and I'd review them again in the future.

Again, please make some sort of an alert. The last time I made a thread about this, there were others who also mentioned they didn't like it

The alert should be showing when you study a list normally and the item is skipped over, but if I understand, you're seeing this while cramming a section or a single-section list?

what I usually do after I make a list of new words is cram that list so that everything gets added to the queue. If I don't do this, sometimes it takes a really long time for the words to add into the queue automatically

That may be a good workaround for the situation, but it's not really a situation for which we're trying to make the banned item notifications work. Usually when people cram a section, they are not trying to add everything, but instead make sure they review each item--in which case, redundant banned notices for words that do show up in the cram session don't make as much sense.

last night I actually got a notification when I saved a new list. It said that one of the items in the list is banned and that perhaps I should unban it.

So, cool. If this notification comes up every time it's appropriate, then the problem is solved