It would be great if when making a custom list users were prompted to select a category that the list fell into, e.g.:
- Textbook
- Literature (books, poems)
- Media (movies, TV shows, magazines)
- Technical (professional, scientific, academic)
- Common Chinese (everyday usage, frequency lists)

I suggest this because I was just taking my first look through the custom lists, and within the first few pages found a few gems (this and its later editions in particular http://www.skritter.com/vocab/list?list=99447023 !), but after the first few pages realized that any further searching through the list would be pretty cumbersome. By categorizing lists users could quickly go to the set of lists they're interested in - I personally have no interest in other Textbook lists (at the moment), and these seem to partly dominate the pages I looked at.

Another useful addition would be some type of sorting system, either by frequency of usage among Skritter users (most popular custom lists) as well as ratings (by Skritter users).

There's a great wealth of material already in the custom lists, but I feel its somewhat inaccessible in the current format of 1000 lists spread across dozens and dozens of pages.

Have you tried searching by tags? I know they're not mandatory, so many lists don't get tagged, but anyone can tag a list.

List popularity is on the to-do list.

@nick - two more tag ideas to put in your hat:

-- is there a way to search for lists which are untagged?

-- is there a way to tag someone else's list?

James

Thanks for that heads up, the tags help a lot! The popularity list would be good too.

@icebear, the list you are referring to was made by mandarinboy. He compiled several of them.
FYI:
Chinese movie frequency 1-1000; 1000-2000; 2000-3000; 3000-4000;4000-5000; in total 5 lists.
Most used nouns
Most used verbs
Most frequently used chengyu

Maybe some of the others might be also of interest to you. It is indeed quite hard to find them if you dont know they exist.

One suggestion on the "List Popularity": I would prefer, if a ranking system could be made by judgement from skritter + last studied + last edited and for sure the number of users, who are studying this. There are so many lists there, who have an interesting title, but when you go into these lists, you only find very few items added. I even would prefer, if these lists could be un-published.
Because of this phenomenon, I have stopped looking through the lists, as there are too many, which are really not useful.