I have terrible trouble when skritter introduces two homonyms in the same week, especially if they are both words that are completely new to me.
Would it be possible either to tell skritter not to do this (eg don't introduce 边 till I'm secure with 釆), or to make sure they crop up consecutively so that I get used to noticing the difference.

I have this problem sometimes, but it doesn't matter when they are introduced. We don't have any immediate plans to do this sort of disambiguation, but one thing that I do that helps is to create a cram list with a bunch of these confusers in there and study that every once in a while.

Something which would help me here would be if I could sort my vocab list by pinyin. You can click on a couple of column headers and sort by that field, but not by pinyin. That would allow me to quickly find the homonyms I should know so that I could create my cram list.

I've recently tweaked the widget for adding words so that you can add words based on pinyin. So if you go to your queue and type in a pinyin, it will return a select box with all words in our system with that pinyin. Given the limitations of the backend, I don't think we'll be able to sort your vocab by pinyin...

that would be a nice feature to have, also if we can have lists of characters that are close in shape to each other, as these are the hard ones