The problem: I added a deck from the shared decks page to my desktop Anki. Anki displayed a window with details, such as “4000 notes added”. I can see the title of the deck on my Anki home page but it has 0 cards. When I click on the deck, there are no cards to be studied. When I look under “Browse”, there are no cards to be seen. I can’t see the cards on my web version of Anki.
Background:
Anki version: 2.1.32 (dee7d45d) (I can’t update due to macOS High Sierra 10.13.4, and I prefer not to update mac due to sluggishness already)
I looked on the forums/FAQs/troubleshooting but did not find a similar question/problem
daily limit is set to 9999
deleted the deck, downloaded it again, several times = each time same problem
tried with a random deck: worked fine
I would be very grateful for your help. I don’t want to waste anyone’s time, so if this problem is already adressed elsewhere (though I did look for it) you can just refer me there.
Is it possible you already have these cards in another deck? (For example, could this be a modified version of another shared deck that you previously downloaded?)
Have you tried running Tools > Check Database? If not, do that.
When the notes were added, were the cards created in a different place that you expect – for instance, if you have a “Deck Override” in your version of the note type? In Browse, instead of clicking on the deck, search for some of the text that is in one of the notes.
I had already tried running Tools > Check Database, it dit not work.
The comment of mbrubeck got me thinking. I did have another french deck which I didn’t use. It was definitely NOT the same deck. However, I removed it just to be sure and tried again. There was an error message (I did not take a screenshot, unfortunately), but the deck seems to be working fine now. The initial error message (before removing the unused deck) did say “added”, but there were many lines of text, some of which did say “updated”. So I presume this must have been the problem.
Thank you all for your help and your generosity with your time and insight!!
To detect duplicates only within the same deck, you need to set “Matching Scope” to “Note type and deck” during importing. Otherwise, with the default settings, notes from other decks that were made from the same note type and happen to have the same first field (often, made for learning the same word) will count as already existing, so the imported info will be pulled inside them instead of generating new cards. If you need your old deck, you can still bring it back and have it alongside the new one. Just use the appropriate settings to avoid conflicts during import.
