Questions about the "leech" tag and suspended cards

Anki Scheduling
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I have some questions about how Anki handles leeches:

  • Suppose my leech action setting is “tag only”. I click “again” on a card 8 times, and it is marked as a leech. Then I remove the “leech” tag and click “again” on it again while reviewing. Will it get marked as a leech again? What if I click “again” 8 more times on that card?
  • Suppose my leech action setting is “suspend card”. I click “again” on a card 8 times, and it gets suspended. Then I manually unsuspend it, and click “again” on it again while reviewing. Will it get suspended again? What if I click “again” 8 more times on that card?

I asked about this on the Anki subreddit but didn’t get a response, so I’m asking here.

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In practice, it would never happen, because the user will immediately redesign the card.

However, create a deck with a single card and test it with a leech threshold of 1 - maybe 2 to be on the safe side.

My own leech setting is 3. As Goldfinger said to James B, “Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.”

Thanks
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@OldGrantonian what do you mean “In practice, it would never happen, because the user will immediately redesign the card”? I have lots of leeches.

Sometimes I intend to redesign them, but I’m busy, or I postpone it, or I can’t think of any reasonable way to redesign them.

And sometimes I redesign them by editing them. Am I supposed to do that? I have a hard time deciding whether to edit my existing cards or to delete them and create new ones. And if I edit them, I’m uncertain whether it is a good idea to remove the “leech” tag. If I edit them, they keep their review history, right? What would happen if I fail them again?

I think your Goldfinger quote is completely irrelevant. Failing a card 3 times is “enemy action”??? Or is it just human memory acting as it usually does, and not remembering everything perfectly?

Is the fact that one has failed a card 3 times a reason to redesign it? Maybe the default is 8 for a good reason, but that is irrelevant to my question.

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I believe the card is re-tagged or suspended after every half leech threshold. From the manual:

Anki will continue to issue leech warnings periodically for a difficult card. The warning interval is half the initial leech threshold. That is, if you have Anki configured to warn at 8 lapses, future warnings will happen every 4 lapses. (12, 16, etc)

https://docs.ankiweb.net/leeches.html

@OldGrantonian
I have a couple of cursed cards, each with about 100 repetitions, that I keep failing every 10 reviews. Some could be badly formatted and irrelevant to my mind, but one particular card that I keep failing that I think should be relevant to my mind to remember it is a card asking for my father’s phone number, but it just refuses to stick in my mind :slight_smile:

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@abdo thank you.

I noticed that in the manual, but it seems unclear to me whether or not issuing leech warnings is the same thing as marking a card as a leech, or suspending it.

Some day, if I don’t get a definite answer, I might do an experiment, or look through the Anki source code and see if I can figure it out. But I am not making any promises.

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You can see the leech counter in the card info screen. It is entirely unaffected by the configured or previous leech actions.

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Thanks @Rumo.

I’m guessing this card info screen is what shows in the card browser if I right click on a card, then click “Info”. Is that right?

If so, what leech counter are you referring to? Is it the number where it says “lapses” (which I would expect to be unaffected by leech actions)? Or something else?

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Yes, leech counter was the wrong term. As you have guessed, I meant the lapse counter.

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The manual is referring to the same thing. Cards are marked as a leech every n/2 lapses after the first lapse.

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Thanks @dae. You answered my question.