I have an tendency to star new words and then study them intensive for a few days until i feel that I am comfortable with them (for the moment). This works well. There is however one thing that bugs me. Since I do eventually get the words correct and will do so many times for a few days the words will be pushed very fare away in to the future. It can be many years. I know we have discussed this before but to me it seems that the SRS pay to much attention to the number of times you get the character right and less to the time span where those came from. since I am aware of this I have to mark the word as wrong after some time to get it back to a normal pace. The same happens if you over practice and have not that many words so the come back often. My question is just, is the algorithm for pushing words in to the future really taking in to concideration the timespan between the correct answers or is it just adding time for each correct answer?

I thought it origionally just took into consideration the time between reviews, e.g. adding x2.2 more time for a correct review. But I was just skimming through "my words" and noticed one which is due in another 9 years or so. I haven't event been skrittering a year yet, so not sure what other factors are taken in place. But like Mandarinboy I also over practice. I like to get more comfortable with my current words before adding more on.

I would love to be able to adjust the maximum time from 9yrs to 1yr for my studies.

Setting the max time from 9 years to 1 year - totally agree.

you can also use the scratchpad to intensively study new words. then the progress is not recorded. you can look at the list, mark what you want to study and export all to the scratchpad through the 'word actions' button.

The SRS takes into account how early or how late you studied the word. So if you studied it really late, but still got it right, it sends it forward proportionally (so if you study it after twice as long as intended, it will push it back twice as far as it would have if you'd studied it on time).

Same goes for the other way. If you study something but it's only 20% ready, it will only be pushed forward 20% as much as it would have had you studied it at the normal time. The lower bound for this is 10% though, so it does increase at least that much, even if it's 1% ready.

Those 9 year ones are there probably because they're never gotten wrong; the time increases much faster if you know something each time you study. Or you studied it a whole bunch of times in a row. Not sure, would have to look at the individual item's history to figure that out.

Scott and I just talked over that minimum 10%, which was put in there to make sure items cycled enough, and we think we can change it to 1% if the item is more than a few days old, which will minimize this type of problem going forward.