I'm trying to make my way through the New HSK word lists. I like to study one section of a list at a time, reading over the section first until I think I know all the words, then I click "Study Section" and keep going until I've reviewed the writings, tones and Pinyin for each entry (I don't study definitions). This is what happens when I do this for a new section:

1) It'll go through the writing for each entry, in the order they appear on the list, testing me the tone for each.

2) It'll ask the Pinyin for the single characters I already know which appear in the multi-character words on the list.

3) It'll ask the Pinyin for all the multi-character words on the list.

4) It'll keep reviewing the writing and the Pinyin for all the multi-character words on the list, but will not ask me again to write any of the single-character entries, and never gets around to asking me the Pinyin for the single-character entries.

Is this a bug? The result of some option I have set? Or is this just not the way I should be adding words?

It sounds like a bug; Nick is a little busy to look at the scheduling so may not be able to fix it right away, but you might have better luck if you study the whole list rather than cramming on individual sections.

Go to the list's main page such as here:

http://www.skritter.com/vocab/list?list=47872248

And click 'study list' on the left (big green button) and choose to study from the beginning. Then just study the list from here.

http://www.skritter.com/study

With any other lists you study or by itself. You can pause adding as you go through to make sure you don't get further ahead than you want to.

There's a known bug where single section study skips the pinyin items for single characters. I haven't gotten around to diagnosing that one yet.

For the reviewing-multiple-character-words-but-not-the-characters-inside-them, this is essentially how it's supposed to work: you are practicing the single character items through the multi-character word prompts, so Skritter doesn't usually have you study the characters separately unless you get the single characters wrong more often than the words containing them. This happens all the time for Chinese, cramming a section or not.