AnkiWeb Account Broken (catch 22 situation)

Syncing & AnkiWeb
1

Tl,Dr; I need to remove a corrupt deck messing with AnkiWeb, but that decks crashes AnkiWeb, making this a catch22 situation, where I need AnkiWeb to remove a deck which breaks AnkiWeb

I tried generating my own AnkiDeck with a web scraper, using python, which worked great. I tried importing my generated decks on PC, but to no avail (JSON parsing error, Import failed. Debugging info: JsonError("decoding models: JsonError(\"invalid type: null, expected a string at line 1 column 595\")")). I then imported them on AnkiDroid, which actually worked. However, I then tried syncing them to AnkiWeb, which resulted in a server error during the upload (sync error: arbitrary string).

Since that error my account is broken. Anything I try to do with AnkiWeb/sync, results in a server side error, probably caused by a deck messing with Anki. I can’t remove/delete that deck either now, its pretty much a catch22 situation.

Every pages I browse on AnkiWeb greets me with: System Error. Sorry, something went wrong while processing your request. Please try again, and if the problem persists, please [let us know](https://help.ankiweb.net/).

Thanks to anyone willing to look into it!

2

To any admin reading this, if its of any help, the names of the “likely broken” decks are:

  • LC::Chinese::HSK{1-6}::Vocab

(By {1-6}, i mean there are 6 of them, and it goes from 1 to 6)

3

I think @dae is the only one who can help you there. If I am not mistaken, it may not be hard for him to simply delete the bad decks. If so, he will also need to know the email address you used for AnkiWeb syncing. If it is the same one you use for this forum, then he can go with that. If not, I recommend getting the email address to him privately: no need to post it publicly on the forums so spam bots can pick it up.

1 Like
4

Thank you for the reply! After some more investigating, it seems the bad decks go away after exactly 2h. (Unless somebody deleted it for me, in which case, kudos to y’all!). Any reattempt, will cause the error again.

Exporting the bad deck, with another valid one, altogether, and syncing it will still cause the server side error still. Funnily enough, the bad deck seems to only affect AnkiWeb and Anki on PC, yet not AnkiDroid.

5

Because AnkiDroid, like older Anki versions, is copying the bad data in during the import without checking it. Writing an .anki2 file manually is not recommended, as it is easy to make such mistakes.

https://addon-docs.ankiweb.net/command-line-use.html?highlight=anki2#command-line-use