Not “dear user, we kindly advise you to not use learning steps longer than 1d”, but “you can’t do that”. Make it so that the learning steps field automatically corrects any step longer than 1d to 1d when FSRS is enabled.
@dae
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I think it’s important that we do this. In fact, even with SM-2. There are people who make videos and write blogs who give people terrible advice on these settings. And unsuspecting innocent users take that more seriously than Anki.
In its extreme form, some people input learning steps starting from 10m to 50 years. I have seen one, Expertium has seen several of those.
Why is a warning not enough?
Because some users ignore it
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Isn’t that the point? If users want to set steps that are not optimal for FSRS, then anki allows them to do this.
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I’ve seen a user who set his learning step to 6d, and then made a post asking “Guys, why is my Hard interval longer than Good?”
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I periodically see how users delete the card and then are surprised that the entire note has been deleted. Although this is a basic concept.
At least provide the ability to disable this behavior.
At least provide the ability to disable this behavior.
Then there is no point. It’s like “The law prohibits this behavior, but here is how you can circumvent the law”.
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Are there any reasons why steps over 1 day are so destructive that they need to be banned for everyone?
There is simply no reason for them to exist when FSRS is enabled. They interfere with FSRS’s scheduling for no good reason whatsoever.
The intervention is that we will see cards with Retrievability other than the set “Desired retention”. How is this different from changing the “Desired retention” or using a filtered deck or using some of the features of the FSRS Helper addon?
No. It hurts absolutely nothing to have steps of 1d+. FSRS still gets data to start calculating memory states, it just can’t take over setting dates quite as soon.
There are lots of good reasons for a user to want to control their first few reviews more closely – not the least of which is to allow time to start trusting an entirely new algorithm. FSRS is great – but you need to give folks time to adapt to it. If you completely bar 1d+ steps, there will be a segment of users who will just say, “no, thanks” to FSRS.
But then that user will just post complaining that their 6d step disappeared and they don’t know why! 
Anki shouldn’t be forcing unnecessary “laws” on everyone to deal with a few people who won’t even read the yellow warning directly below the box with their learning steps.
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Yeah, that would be dataloss.
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I think learning steps are beneficial when students want to cram for their exams.
For example, they can create learning steps to review for their exams in a week or two, and then review as usual for their long term exams.
If they did not use learning steps, the timing of the review may be out of date with the exam and their score may drop.
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While it pains me to see influencers recommending all sorts of non-default settings, some users prefer to have more control over the initial intervals, and this would take that control away from them. If FSRS is performing badly when the user uses longer learning steps, perhaps we should be making it more resilient to such use cases instead. We can still keep recommending to users that they keep shorter steps, and even make the warning more dire if need be, but I’m not sure banning them is the right way forward.
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