I am wondering, why I do get so many reviews for Pinyin, even very easy characters, which are set for e.g. writing review in a few years from now, appear for pinyin review.
For quite some while, I didn't type in the pinyin, especially not for those very easy characters / words. I just hit "Show" and when I was right on the pinyin, I clicked "Correct". Can it be, that e.g. for words, as there was no input, the missing characters are evaluated as wrong? I do not want to type all the time even the easy characters and words, which I already know very well, because it needs quite some time and I have normally a few hundred reviews every day.
I think, on the statistics, the values do not reflect this phenomena, it's stated correctly. My weakest point is character definition, but I'm getting more Pinyin than Definitions - at least that's my feeling from the last few weeks.

I have noticed this as well. I seem to get an awful lot of reading questions which are sometimes so numerous I eliminate reading from the practice settings.

Hmm, you might be onto something there. I'll check it out. Can you confirm that the pinyin prompts you keep getting are single characters only, or does it overdo the multiple-character words' pinyin prompts, too?

nick, I cannot really analyze it in a way, that would help you. Therefore, let me tell you, what I know and what I guess.
I first came across this phenomena with the character 气. I've got the read review and I was wondering why, as the writing was due in 9 years, but the reading "ready". I assume, that the reading was originally also due in 9 years from now, as this is for me a very simple character (I'm on upper intermediate to advanced level). But even getting the pinyin right and marked as easy, it came back and back again. The same happened with other simple characters. So I assume, that there must be a kind of side effect. Therefore I assumed, that when I was not inputting this character in pinyin in a word, but just hitting the "correct" button, that this may be the root cause of this problem, however, this is guessing. So the fact is, that somewhere, there is a side effect that decreases the pinyin level of this character. I didn't see this effect on words, only for characters.
For me, I'm often not to sure in a word, which character is correct, e.g.: 行李, I had problems remembering which "li" is part of the word, but I do not have a problem with the character li itself. So I think, if I get this word wrong, Skritter should downgrade the word, but not downgrade the character, which I got wrong in the word. My feeling is, that there is a side effect between words and characters.

Nick, any feedback on this issue? It's really a problem for my learning, because I'm getting so many reviews on the pinyin, which is really some waste of time.

Roland,
I don't know how you're handling the grading of the example you give but I think the way you need to do it (it works for me under similar circumstances) is this:

1. skritter gives you a "correct" on 行, that's fine
2. skritter gives you a "forgot" on 李, you need to override that grade with "correct" once you realize that you entered the wrong li4, if indeed you know how to write李
3. after that, mark the word writing as "forgot" so that skritter will retest you on the word, not the individual characters

If you don't do step 2 you'll get 李 back to be tested on it. If you do step 2 but not step 3 it'll assume you know both the chars and the words so you won't see any of it for a while. I do this a lot; it's a bit tedious but there's no way for skritter to know that you know how to write the chars but you don't know the word unless you do this hand-grading.

sarac,
I do it exact the way, you describe. Fact is, that I have a lot of pinyin for review, more than writing, tone, definition together. From where this phenomena is coming, is just guessing - I don't know.

Today, during practicing,I looked up quite a number of basic characters. They all have the lowest level on pinyin and defintion, with pinyin being by far the lowest; e.g. I looked up 是: Writing 9 years, Tone 9 years, Pinyin 2 month, Definition 23 month. I will never have this character wrong as a character, so why is pinyin and definition so low? It can only come from a word or expression, where 是 is used or it might be a bug in the algorithms or the code.
The effect for me is, that I can't any longer handle this. Today I pushed back almost 1000 reviews, recently, I have every day more than 500 reviews, close to 1000 or even more. Today I had 750 reviews on pinyin (in total, I guess it was slightly above 1000).

I have not added any new item for the last couple of weeks, but instead that the number of reviews is getting down, it's permanently getting up.
Please also have a look at my statistics, I think, the statistic is right. If so, I should get more on character definition, and not on pinyin. Also cmccorvey's comment above is mentioning the same problem.

I will prioritize this and figure out what's going on as soon as I can.

I think I have fixed it. It was as you described. I actually have a ton of code for figuring out when we do and don't submit which scores for individual characters during pinyin prompts (unlike writing and tone prompts), but I hadn't handled that case. Sorry about that! Thanks again for diagnosing the problem so well.

Let me know if you still see any weirdness for pinyin reviews that are scheduled for words you practice from today forward. The old reviews will still be overscheduled from before, unfortunately. You can periodically switch your parts studying to just pinyin, then use Save Me, then switch back to all parts, until things settle down. That will just push back the pinyin reviews.

Nick,

thanks. I'll give you a feedback in a week.