Since Scott mentioned it a while back I have become more and more desperate to get the queue turned into a custom list. What's driving me a little batty is that I now turn on only one study mode at a time so I can more efficiently get through my due items, and then turn on all the modes when I'm down to zero. The problem arises when I want to add a new item to my queue in the middle of that process; for example, let's say I'm reviewing only writing, have trouble with 炉, go into the component breakdown, and decide I want to add 户. If I click on the little plus sign, I am only going to get the writing for 户, even if I later turn readings and definitions back on. That is, the item is added to my queue with my current practice modes, not with the practice modes I am using when it finally gets to the head of my queue. This problem also applies to people who started out studying only simplified and now want to add traditional, or really any other change in study modes, and who use the queue.

I think the simplest way to handle this would be, as Scott has suggested, to convert the queue into a special kind of custom list. Then whenever we added something to the queue, it would go by default at the end of the list, but we could go in using the list editor and reshuffle things if we wanted. To keep the sections sane, "add to queue" would need to create new sections automagically, maybe just indexing them 1, 2, 3 or whatever, whenever they got too big. Or the sections could be named using the date and time, whatever.

The big advantage of this for me would be that I could restart the custom queue list as many times as I needed in order to add all the missing parts of words. The big advantage for other people would be that they could more easily go in and edit their queue using the standard list editor. The big advantage for the Skritter developers is that they wouldn't have to maintain the separate queue browser/editor page any more, as it would be combined with the list editor. The list editor seems like it's been the focus of a lot of shiny new development lately and I would be very happy if it took over from the queue browser/editor page.

James

A second on this idea: I'd like this feature, too. I stopped using the nifty "add to skritter" feature because the things I add to the queue are essentially lost until I stumble across them while practicing. I really liked the convenience of that feature and now I sometimes get words into a custom list but, more often, I simply don't add them to practice. The odd word parts (as James describes) or words found while reading, all of those could so easily go into practice with "add to Skritter" and the queue.

I nuked a couple of months ago so I now know where all my words have come from, only from lists, both textbook and my custom list. Why exactly do I want to have a record of what's in Skritter? I don't know exactly but from time to time I go back and look at a list to remind myself of what is there, see what my progress looks like and to admire all that green!

I imagine it something like James/Scott suggest - a special custom list. I can see it automatically making sections/lists or maybe the user could extract chunks with the list editor and make separate sections when he/she chose to.

I too would like the queue to be a custom list. Perhaps every user should automatically get a list with their own name like _queue or some such with automatic sections (date) every X words.

We could even practice each others queues :)

Yes, you describe it as it will happen. We're tending to focus more on usability and bugs than new features right now, though, so not sure yet when we'll target this one.