I am having an issue where reviewing a card does not update the due date. I have attached a screen shot for reference. For example on this card, I answered “good” on 2024-04-05 which gave it an interval of 2.77 months. I did this on AnkiMobile which syncs to my other devices. When I went to do reviews on my desktop PC today, this card showed up again today 2024-04-07 despite me having answered it correctly 2 days ago with a 2.77 month interval. This happened on ~40 other cards that I answered in the past 2 days. AnkiWeb is clearly seeing/syncing the latest review, but not updating the due date accordingly, so why is this happening?
Does it have anything to do with using more than 1 device? I use AnkiMobile on iPhone, a Mac laptop, and a desktop PC, all of which are synced to my AnkiWeb account. I am also using FSRS and have been for ~4 months without scheduling issues.
FSRS is enabled and all learning steps are the same across devices.
Below is an example of why this is a big problem. I answered the card again today and the interval was drastically different (1.63 months vs 2.47 months) than it was 2 days ago when I answered it correctly.
I agree that’s weird. I’m going to throw out a couple ideas, and it’s possible that none of them will help.
Does it have anything to do with using more than 1 device?
That’s a good possibility. When you move between devices are you strict about always syncing coming-and-going (when you open and close the app, when you start and end your session)? If you do any studying when things are out of sync, this can result in this sort of duplicate study.
What about FSRS?
It looks like you turned on FSRS sometime between 16 Nov and 13 Jan – has it been the FSRS “built-in” to Anki the whole time, or did you use the “custom”/advanced-scheduling method before that?
Did you start out using the default parameters or optimized parameters?
a. How often have you re-optimized your parameters since then, and when most recently? What are your current parameters?
What’s your desired retention? How often have you changed that setting since you started using FSRS, and when most recently?
Did these screenshots come from the same device?
[In addition to what you reported, odd things catch my eye – Your cards are being set to intervals longer than their Stability, and for relatively difficult material. Your Difficulty is going up despite getting the card correct, but if parameters changed in between, there could be an explanation for that.]
I always sync when I am finished with a review session on one device, prior to moving to a different device. I don’t think this scenario is a case of being “out of sync” since it recorded the review from 2024-04-05, or at least it was captured in the log, then gave me the card again on 2024-04-07.
I transitioned from SM2 to FSRS in ~January 2024. It has always been the FSRS “built-in” to Anki, which I accessed via “Options” → “Advanced”
I believe I started with optimized parameters, as I had several months of SM2 data on the deck prior to switching to FSRS.
a. I re-optimize about once every month, last one would have been 2024-04-01 (first of this month). Current parameters: 0.2692, 0.5273, 1.4452, 7.9731, 5.2603, 1.4346, 1.1269, 0.0141, 1.6021, 0.3996, 0.9555, 2.3113, 0.0389, 0.3575, 1.8029, 0.3239, 3.3143
My desired retention is set to 0.90, and this has not changed since I started using FSRS.
These screenshots are from the same device (desktop PC), one before the review I did today (2024-04-07) and one immediately after, as I noticed the answer options had very different intervals than I was used to seeing (hard/good/easy were all within 1 day in interval).
To address your last comments, that is odd. I guess I hadn’t given too much thought to the discrepancy between interval and stability, as my average retrievability has been close to goal (93%) since switching to FSRS.
That’s a bit different than what I asked. I notice that you’re not saying you also sync at the start of a review session. That means that you’re possibly doing that review session on an out-of-date database – exactly what can cause conflicts. Even if that’s not the cause here, it’s important for you to be aware of it.
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Knowing that the parameters on 13 Jan were not the same as the ones in April makes me much less concerned about the Difficulty going up.
Nuts! I was hoping you had a really weird desired retention, or crazy parameters. The intervals being longer than Stability doesn’t seem right.
(or that the screenshots came from different devices, because that makes a sync issue less likely)
I thought of a few more things to wonder, but I’m heading toward any sort of eureka-moment yet. I’ll keep thinking about it, but I bet I’m missing something obvious, so hopefully some of this information will be helpful to another set of eyes!
Do you have any scheduling related add-ons?
After you re-optimize (or even without re-optimizing) do you run an FSRS “reschedule” on some or all of your cards – either through the Deck Options or the FSRS Helper add-on?
I want to suggest you run a Check Database – but I’m hesitating, because it could “fix” something and paper-over the signs of some real issue. Instead – when was the last time you did a Check Database?
To address the syncing again, the desktop version of Anki, at least for me, always initiates a sync when both opening and closing the app. I always sync when I am finished with a review session, but I do not regularly manually sync after opening Anki on a computer, as it initiates this automatically and I get a message saying “collection sync complete.” If I do not get this message, I will manually sync. I do manually sync coming-and-going when using AnkiMobile. Therefore, when I started the review session on 2024-04-07, I had already synced to AnkiWeb prior to answering any cards, and it still gave me that card (and several others) from 2024-04-05 and 04-06.
I use FSRS4Anki Helper to auto disperse siblings when review, otherwise no add-ons that affect scheduling.
I have not used the “Reschedule cards on change” function since switching to FSRS, so the re-optimized parameters do not come into affect until the next review.
I do not think I have ran a Check Database since downloading this deck from AnkiHub ~6 months ago.
I would like to add that this is not the first time this has happened. In the past, it has been a handful (1-5) of cards. However, yesterday it was ~40 cards, which is why I was concerned. This time, it happened after answering cards exclusively on AnkiMobile for 2 days (2024-04-05 and 04-06) because I was traveling, and then going to do reviews on Anki for desktop on 04-07 - after having synced prior to starting the session.
Thanks for the reply, Dae. I did sync at the start of this review session. In this case, it is not undoing the review I did on the first device, it is adding another review on top of it. I can’t explain why Anki is logging the latest review from 2024-04-05 and updating the interval, but not affecting the due date. Then when I go to do reviews on the second device, it gives me the card again because it still shows it as “due” on 2024-04-05 despite me having answered it correctly on that day with a “good” interval of 2.77 months. I will add that I did ~300 reviews between 2024-04-05 and 04-06, and ~40 of the cards did not have the due date changed despite logging a review and modifying the interval. It is hard to make sense of why it would only be those 40 cards and not the whole batch from the previous 2 days that have this problem.
The current card state matches the penultimate review. That indicates a sync conflict - the card was modified on one device when it was in that penultimate state (because the final state hadn’t been synced to that device yet), and then when you sync that device, it ends up overwriting the final state from the other device with that penultimate state, since it was made more recently.
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