I had several short lists that I decided to amalgamate. Once I finished adding all the words into the new list, I deleted the lists the words came from. Skritter is now feeding all these words again as if they were new words! Is there any way to tell Skritter that I already know those words?

it can never harm to review them again!
then you just press button number 4.

Or simply ban the temporarily, when your ready to review again, add them?

Do you want to study those words? If yes, let Skritter add them all from your new big list before you continue to add new words. It can't take longer than a few minutes! Skritter knows how well you know them, even if it adds them to your studies again.

@Schnabelhund, I like that idea... thanks everybody

Is the moral of the story "don't ever delete a list?" Did the number of words you know drop on your stats page? Why would these words come out of your "My Words"?

@Markschow: before deleting the list I incorporated the words into another list. The stats are not affected. My problem was that Skritter considered the words to be "new words" so it fed them all over again; not a big problem, once I answered, Skritter knew that I had already learned that word

If you do want to delete a list, I think the better way is as follows:
1. Make new lists, and start to study them.
2. Make sure you "Add" at least 1 word from each list
3. Check each list to make sure progress goes as far as you expect it to.
4. Delete old lists.

For step 2, you may need to manually add these words, so it might help to temporarily stop studying your other lists.

When you do step #2, it will scan through the new list to try to find a word you haven't studied yet. Since the old lists are still available, it will actually go to the next new word... if you've already studied all the words in the list, it will mark the list as completely studied!

This isn't guaranteed to work, since I haven't tried it... maybe when you delete the old lists it will still mark all of the words as not studied. Someone from HQ should probably comment on that...

It shouldn't mark the words as new words unless you had them added from the old list and still hadn't studied them (or at least one part of them). It never resets the SRS progress unless you use Delete All to get rid of everything in your account.

Were the "new" old words you were getting things that you had reviewed each of the parts for at least once?