Incorrect/unintuitive 'New' card order

Anki Scheduling
1

Hi all!

I study by unsuspending New cards by tag (as I go through lectures) and then doing them in the order they were created. Today, I sat down to study after unsuspending some cards, but noticed they weren’t being displayed in the order created (despite having selected the ‘show New cards in order created’, and having tried the usual technique of toggling back and forth between random order and order created, which usually works)

However, I soon realised that this was happening because although the cards are from the same parent deck, they belong to different subdecks - Anki seems to be pulling cards from subdecks in alphabetical order (so cards that are created later, but part of a subdeck whose name comes first, are shown first).

Within the subdecks, Anki is respecting the order of creation.

Have I got this right? If so, although I understand this is Anki’s normal behaviour, it seems a bit unintuitive when trying to study by tag. For example, say I had a parent deck P containing two subdecks (A and B). Let’s say I unsuspend all cards with tag ‘Spanish’ because I’ve just finished the lecture on Spanish, but there are Spanish cards in both subdeck A and B. It just seems a little unintuitive to me that a card tagged ‘Spanish’ belonging to subdeck A will be shown first even if it was created later than a card in subdeck B, just because subdeck A’s name comes first alphabetically?

Is there any way to force Anki to show me the New cards in order of creation, regardless of which subdeck they are in?

Thanks!

2

It seems that Anki wasn’t meant to be used as it is today by a number of users who spread their cards across many decks and then study a common parent deck. You should find that a lot of issues resolve themselves when you put all the cards you usually study in the same session into a single deck.
If you have any particular reason for separate decks, you can use a filtered deck to achieve a similar behaviour.

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3

Yeah I see what you mean - thanks! No particular reason for multiple decks, it’s just that the pre-made deck I use came like that.

So for the filtered deck part, if you have separate decks, you could create a filtered deck by tag, which would compile all the cards with that tag and then show them in order of creation?

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4

Correct. I guess you want to study the due review cards, too, regardless of their tag. Maybe it’s enough to adjust the filter correspondingly, otherwise you’ll need the second filter that is only available with the new scheduler enabled.

5

Should be fine because I review in a random order (and have no review limit)?

6

I can’t say for sure what’s best for your situation. I’d just give it a try and see what’s possible.

7

Sure thing; thanks again for your help Rumo!

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