As of this moment there are 396 published lists. These are displayed in reverse date of publication. It is good that so many people are generating lists for the benefit of others, especially those that link to text books and courses, but finding ones that might be of value is not particularly easy - I have published the vocab from two text books (each with 10 separate chapters of 30 - 40 characters) but they are separated by 3 months i.e. 200 or so files. Would it be a good idea to set up folders to group those lists which link together, and also provide meaningful labels for them? A title like 'lesson' is not particularly helpful. Perhaps grouping all of one contributor's efforts into a folder that he / she is invited to name? Failing this - an alphabetical sort and/or search?

I agree, the current list of lists is not very helpful, especially since many published lists seem to be only for personal use and were maybe published by accident or because the user didn't know they can study the list without publishing it.

I see two ways to deal with this problem: One way would be for everyone to be able to attach a rating and tags to the lists. That way, better lists would rise to the top.

It also would be very good to provide categories for the lists. Here's some suggestions for categories for the lists I saw:

- Textbooks & University Courses
- Language characteristics
* Character lists ordered by frequency
* Lists of radicals, idioms etc.
* HSK preparation
- Living in China (e.g. "How to order chinese food", the list of Shanghai Metro stations I'm preparing, etc.)
- Topical lists (e.g. food, places, ...)
- Words taken from books and magazines

I also think it would rock to attach a difficulty rating to the lists. This could be done automatically by analyzing the characters used. (Let me know if you need some backend programming for that :-)).

Lastly, I think the lists would benefit from some clearing up. E.g. all those "Lianbao Lektion x to y" lists could be grouped together into one new public list. The original lists would then be unpublished, so that the original creator can still use them.

Even better, simply sort them by popularity, ie the ones that the most people are using are obviously the most useful.

The first thing I'm going to try is a tagging system. That's up there on my list of priorities. We'll let users tag lists with whatever terms they like, and hopefully that will help! I'll aim to get that done in the next month or so; it is getting pretty out of hand.

Popularity sorting will probably come with the ranking system. That will be used to rank users and lists and probably other things as well! That will probably come a bit later.

Actually, I don't agree with popularity being very useful. I guess the profile of Skritter users varies a lot, and what might be useful to one person might not be useful at all to another.

Just like the Top 25 at the iTunes App Store - populated with games and fart apps I'm not in the least interested in :-)

If I want to try a new list I would have to uncheck my current list. Can I then go back to my original list from where I was or would I have to start again?

@Grahameh You don't have to uncheck your list, you can have more than one active at once. And don't worry, if you uncheck a list and then go back and start it again, you will start where you left off.

When you uncheck a list, it just stops adding characters from that list, it doesn't remove all the things you've already added from it. Let's say you start out studying one list, and it adds 中国. Now you study 中国 and it goes into your list of items to review. If you uncheck that list and select other lists, 中国 will still be in your list of items to study. You can even uncheck *ALL* your lists and 中国 will still come up for review.

James

Another way to stop working on a list temporarily is to pause that list. Click "active lists" on the upper right of the practice page and you'll get a list of your selected lists. There's a "play" and a "pause" button next to each. I have several lists selected which I draw from - one is my textbook which I pause when I've caught up with the class and then I switch to my HSK list, for example.

Following what James writes above - indeed you are making your own database of characters and words drawn from various lists or entered singly in the queue. You can look at that in the viewer - it is probably a dauntingly long list. You do have the option of deleting something from your list by clicking the empty box to the left of an entry. Or when it comes up for practice you can click on the magnifying glass and then click "delete".