Negative new card limit limits reviews

Anki Help
1

If I set a custom study, choosing Increase today’s new card limit, then inputting Increase today’s new card limit by -99999, I get no new cards, but also no reviews. Am I misunderstanding something, or is this a bug?

2

Increasing the new limit also increases the review limit, since new cards are limited by reviews with the default options. When you use a negative number, you get the opposite.

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3

I honestly don’t get it. Are you saying more new cards —> more review cards and less new cards —> less review cards? I thought the opposite would be true.

I thought new card limit is seperate from review limit and both are putting a maximum cap on new cards. Why does it have to be so complicated :weary:

4

That makes sense, thank you. It’s a bit unintuitive in cases like mine, but I’m not sure I can think of a better implementation.

For anyone else who needs a workaround: just set the new card limit significantly lower than the review limit, and then decrease today’s limit by the exact amount you set.

5

Say your review limit is 100 cards and new card limit is 10 cards. If you do 90 reviews and 10 new cards, those are going to count together toward your review limit, so that’s going to be at 100/100, and your new card limit will be at 10/10. Say you want to study 5 more new cards. If you could only increase your new card limit, it would be at 10/15, but your review limit would still be at 100/100, i.e. maxed out, so you wouldn’t see the cards. That’s why it has to increase both limits, so that you will see the new cards.

6

Now I get it. Thanks! But still, the behaviour when you’re putting a negative number can be different. Something like this: if you increase new card limit, review limit gets increased. If you decrease new card limit again, review limit decreases to the original limit. It doesn’t dip below further than that. To users, things would work intuitively then.

TBH though, having an option to “don’t show new cards when there’s a backlog” is much better than the current situation but it’s not as effective so power users are going to hate it.