Some time long ago, I banned the character 缠.I added the word 纠缠 today and was cramming the list just now. When it came up, I thought to myself that I remember the character 缠, but not very clearly, so I clicked on the magnifying glass to browse through other words that it's a part of. By chance I noticed that it says "banned" in all 4 study columns. Had I not seen this, I would just assume that this item will show up in my review queue, but it probably wouldn't because it's banned.

I think there should definitely be some sort of feature/function that alerts users if there's a banned item in a list they've just made. If not I'm going to unban everything I've previously banned and stop using that feature

I might be wrong, but in my understanding the reason you weren't alerted was that you only banned the character by itself, words containing it are not affected by this.

If you had banned the word itself then it would show up in your list as banned with a red background and in the studying mode when the word would normally be added instead a little alert at the top of the study screen would say, that a banned word was skipped.

right, but I think there should be an alert for any item that has a banned character in it, because it's the same issue

But often you want to ban individual characters from coming up just on their own--wouldn't you want to still be able to study words using them without being annoyed by an alert all the time?

@Nick sometimes I add too many characters/words and then later realize that I'm overextending myself. When this happens, I usually slow down and possibly ban certain items if I realize that I shouldn't have added them in the first place. Then, months/years will go by and at some point I'll add characters that have been previously banned, but this time I'll be ready to learn them. If the system stays the way it is now I probably won't know if an item I've added was previously banned, and I'll cram the list and wrongly assume that it will be floating around somewhere in the spaced repetition queue.

So, yes, I think there should be alerts when newly made lists have banned characters within them

This is essentially the problem that I've been complaining about since at least this thread: http://www.skritter.com/forum/topic?id=140488271 but really going back to this one: http://www.skritter.com/forum/topic?id=117194855

It is that there is no easy way to simply "subtract" a word from "my words" without banning it. Like Bohan, I often get over-enthusiastic and add too many words to the Queue (or Miscellaneous, as it's now known). Sobering up and recognizing that I don't need to be studying this word AT THIS TIME is a much different use case from banning, which, in my mind, is for leeches that I NEVER want to study. For the former, I'd want them to be added automatically if they came up in another list, for the leeches, they can be well and truly banned.

For what it's worth, after having 6 months to get used to it, I can tolerate the new list system and work around some of its annoyances, but I am firm in the belief that the old system worked better for me and the decision to switch was a wrong one.

The fact you can't just delete items makes me a little crazy too. I accidenta-added 5 words like three months ago. They're the only words I've ever added (I just use this for single characters), so the perfectionist in me hates that they're still technically there.

weirdesky: go to the list you added the words to (probably Miscellaneous) and delete them from the list.

Dependable, I added them from the scratchpad.

And Nick, if you chance upon this thread again:
I like that you can ban characters seperately from words. I've recently started studying words, and I'll ban the characters that are now found in my words (as in, in the words that I have added, not the section "My Words"). Would there be away to search for things I have duplicates of without going character by character?

No, I don't think so... but I'm not entirely sure I understand. You want to ban all single characters which are already contained in multiple-character words you're studying? Why?

Yeah, that's kind of what I want to do. One of the reasons that I want to do is a lot because I only study writings. I don't studying readings or definitions (I'm lazy, those are hard). So that means if I can write that character in the context of a word, then I already know how to write, so the purpose of having it as a single character is kind of moot.

I also cheated horribly with my character definitions, making them more or less the same as words. For example, this is my definition for the character 泥:

rod; stick; cane; pole; club; line¶ どろぼう【泥＿】Robber

Since I've add the word 泥棒, studying that character became completely redundant.

I started doing definitions like this around the 700～1,000 character mark, because I would get confused, because when there was something about envy in the definition whether the character it was looking for was 嫉, 妬 or 羨. So I started putting things in those definitions to help me tell them apart (for those three, the first two are in the Sino-Japanese word for envy, 嫉妬, and the last one is the native Japanese word for jealous, 羨ましい).

I think you would have to do an export of all your words, some fiddling with the results (maybe in Excel or Google Docs), and then use the output from that.

Hmmm... I'm not sure I'm competent enough to do that. I'll probably just get a list of JLPT kanji, and then ban all of those (because I'm doing the JLPT lists XD). But someday I'm hoping to be all words, because characters are just so boring in comparison (I think).