Easy option for new cards in extremely far long into the future

Anki FSRS
1

I have a deck that randomly started to suggest 6.6 years (!) as “Easy” option for the new cards. I was OK with <1 month, 2-3 would be OK too, but 6.6 years is crazy. How do I change or limit this interval? I tried changing desired retention, but this had no effect.

I also noticed higher “Easy” intervals in other decs, though not as severe. This happend after a pause. Why? Is this an expected behavior?

2

It’s not happening “randomly.” Those intervals are set based on your parameters, your Desired Retention (DR), and the card’s own review history.

The first thing to consider is – the interval on that button only matters if answering that card is exceptionally easy. Is it? If not, don’t grade it Easy.

A few possible reasons for that –

  • You changed the DR in a different preset. The preset that controls scheduling for that card is the one for the subdeck that card is actually in. It also might have a deck-specific “This deck” DR.
  • The interval is already limited by something else. For instance, I note that 6.6y ≈ 2400d. If that preset has that as a max interval and its already hitting that, simply increasing the DR might not be enough to pull it back from that.

[I’m deliberately not suggesting you set a lower max interval to address this. It would be better to figure out if there’s actually a problem than to simply hobble Anki’s ability to get the easiest cards out of your way.]

This is the most likely reason. If the card is not actually New, and is overdue from when it should have been reviewed, and you still find it exceptionally easy to answer, then that might be appropriate scheduling.

If you want someone to take a look at this for you, we’ll also need to know –

  • Your FSRS parameters as text and your DR.
  • How long has it been since you re-optimized your parameters?
  • When you optimize in this preset, how many reviews does FSRS count? (If you don’t remember, you can click “Optimize Current” to get the number, and close without saving.)
  • The maximum interval in this preset.
  • Your Stats for the decks/subdecks that use this preset – click Save PDF to get the whole page and attach that here.
  • The Card Info for a card that has had this issue (screenshot is fine).
3

That was the case, thank you. But what if I have a deck with many levels of subdecks, and I want to change the DR for all of them? Do I always have to go through subdecks one by one? (Assuming I’m not comfortable with changing DR for the whole preset.) That is not really comfortable. Often decks are composed from many downloaded decks that use the default preset.

4

First, it sounds like you have too many decks/subdecks, and you should consider using Tags for organization instead to make Options management easier.

If you have many decks/subdecks that you want to set to a different DR, you have a couple of options –

  • Switch the highest level one to a deck-specific “This Deck” DR and “Save to All Subdecks” – Deck Options - Anki Manual . The downside of that is that you’ve now got a lot of deck-specific DRs out there, which you need to remember and manage.
  • Move that tree of decks/subdecks to a different Options preset. The main downside is that their parameters will now be separately optimized on different review history, and less of it. [Although there is a way to modify them to both use the same history and get the same parameters. If you choose this path, ask about that.] On top of that, you’ll now have 2 presets that you need to change whenever you want to change anything else in Options.

If what you meant was that you have many decks/subdecks that you want to set to many different DRs – that’s almost certainly more fine-tuning than you need to be doing, so you should reconsider.

5

That should work, thank you. I know it’s better to use tags, but you often have to work with a lot of old decks/decks by someone else.

6

Don’t let those old decks be the boss of you! You can apply your own tags and move the cards out of subdecks, if that makes things work better for you. I also hear good things about the Convert Subdecks to Tag Hierarchy add-on. [No personal experience with it though, so before experimenting, make a backup to be safe.]