Oh, I see, the overflow caused the constantly increasing accumulation of cards. Yes, maybe all this needs some kind of hint feature on the deck level telling when this accelerates without the need to look at stats.
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Different brains, different aims.
There are at least two types of user aims:
- The student who needs to learn a certain amount in a certain amount of time. He will have to limit the number of reviews per day.
- The senior (like me) who wants to keep his brain busy. He does not feel the need to learn a lot of new cards, but to review all the cards that are due.
I wonder if it is possible to find robust default settings that suit to both. Therefore, dae’s proposal is a good idea to introduce some kind of warning when the pile of overdue cards grows too much. The limit at which the warning is triggered could be so high that the majority of users will not reach it just to avoid confusing them.
My proposal was more general and might be confusing.
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I’m in category 2 (but not yet retired). My own solution is to restrict new cards to 0 and add new cards in with a filtered deck or a custom learning session. That way I control the flow of new cards, if too much I just don’t add in new cards and focus on learning the existing cards.
Well, there are (individual) solutions. I just want the programme to give a hint in the rare cases when something goes wrong.
It’s not a proposal, it’s a message that is already shown at the top of the congratulations screen whenever you have overdue cards.
Daily review limits were introduced after observing many users returning to Anki after a break, being overwhelmed by the number of pending reviews, and giving up on the program completely. Future Anki versions may automatically cap new card introduction when there’s a backlog, which should make it harder to miss.
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The implanted warning is just a warning that can be ignored for a while without hurting the algorithm at all.
My suggestion was more of a general message when Anki’s algorithm is definitely going wrong.
Yes, but as mentioned, it’s a very open-ended state, hard to define what is wrong but showing the amount of total cards, new and cards to study is really the best option. I would hope anyone looking at that would make conclusions about the progress.
Proposal:
If the overdue pile exceeds ten times the sum of new cards per day plus review cards per day, send a message like:
Anki’s algorithm needs to be adjusted: Please look at your statistics.
What needs then to be adjusted? Why ten? You see the issue? Maybe an in face value of the status of cards in the deck would be better? The default screen with no plugins has no info about this in the deck overview. You have to open up the decks and then you get the info. Or showing the info on the top deck level only if it hits some defined criteria?
In most cases it’s not to adjust the algorithm or even the deck options, rather letting the learner know that’s there’s a huge amount of cards that needs action.
The odd thing is if Anki users never bother to look at the Deck level settings that show that info… See default screen example below:
What needs then to be adjusted?
Is individual.
Why ten?
This number is just a proposal. It should be high enough to avoid users already getting the message while the algorithm is still working well. And it should be low enough to avoid disappointment.
You see the issue?
I hope so: to avoid users continuing to learn while the algorithm is already working incorrectly (overdue trap).
You should then write a bug report that describes how the default learning algorithm causes the overdue trap with an example workflow showing how this algorithm is reproduced.