When a deck has children, reviews are taken from all children decks at once, instead of showing each deck’s review cards one by one. The review limit of the child decks is ignored - only the limit of the deck you clicked on applies.
It seems that this behavior is implemented as advertised on Android, but on desktop (Linux client, 2.1.35), the limits of child decks are first applied, before the parent limit is applied. That is, say parent has limit of 20, child has limit of 10, and child deck has 15 cards due. On Android, the parent deck would have 15 cards to review, but on desktop it shows 10.
Personally, I find the current behavior on desktop to be more intuitive. It also supports my use case where I use a parent deck only as a grouping mechanism. So I set daily review limit to be very high for the parent, and each child deck’s own limit would kick in.
In any case, which behavior (Android vs desktop) is the intended design going forward? It’d be helpful to know when structuring my decks. Also, if the Android behavior is indeed the correct one, is there a workaround to support the use case I mentioned above?
I’ll be revisiting the queue building code soon, and there’s a chance the current behaviour will change. But for now, the intended behaviour of the v2 scheduler is that the limit of the clicked-on deck is the only limit that is honored, so AnkiDroid is the correct one - the desktop currently can act oddly when you have a smaller parent limit, and you may find the remaining counts go negative as you review.
FWIW, I’d advocate for the “wrong” behavior on desktop right now, for when you revisit this part of the code. In that setup, if you want to achieve the current behavior, then just set the child decks to have very high limits, in which case only the parent deck’s limit applies. In essence, you’d be able to get both behaviors supported.
In the opposite scenario, I don’t quite see a workaround to achieve the behavior I want. I’m currently fumbling with filtered decks to get it to do what I want, but that has its own drawbacks (with rebuilding and such).
Sorry to necro an old thread, but I just updated to the Anki 2.1 scheduler and observed this new behaviour for the first time. Count me as another vote for making it work the “old way” – I use parent decks with very high limits to group my decks and then set limits on the child decks.
For now I’ve downgraded back to the old scheduler. Luckily I noticed before I had synced my deck so it was easy!
Yup I wasn’t too happy when I noticed the new scheduler broke the limits of my nested decks.
I vote for the old behavior → it allows you to work any way you want. The new behavior is a regression IMO.
I just upgraded to 2.15.6 and the new scheduler and it is ignoring the subdeck review limits. I much prefer the older method where the subdeck limits are retained. If I miss a day or two I use the review limits on the subdecks to smooth out the recovery over a period of time. I currently have a backlog of 101 cards in a deck with a deck limit of 60 reviews, this eats into the backlog at 10 to 20 cards a day.