That’s probably not an issue for AH as they only serve in English IIRC. But, problem for Anki yes.
Yeah, I was talking about Anki
On that note, I don’t think that a fork would be a good idea. Although, imagining a future where the fork is more popular than the original Anki is pretty fun. I would pay a hefty sum of money to see Dae’s face if users prefer the fork
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Or even better than a fork - we could make two different layouts within Anki
Honestly, if you (or any person reading this) have the technical skills to do that, I would highly recommend you to submit a PR. It’s much less likely to be rejected by Dae if he’s not the one doing all the work.
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I think the first thing you do is, then, putting away some features in “Advance” category. I’m not sure we can have a consensus about it. Good luck on getting everyone to agree to it. Support folks will hate it because now they need to give people extra steps to things.
That’s the thing - there will be fewer questions to begin with because most people will just stick to the “Beginner” layout.
The writing style makes it engaging, and it looks to be well made, but I unfortunately still feel that a deck is not the best way to be teaching the majority of Anki concepts: it’s difficult to maintain & translate, it tends to result in wordier cards than we want to be encouraging users to make, etc.
How have they been received so far? I can definitely see the use for step by step guides in some areas, and I presume that website is less work than creating a polished video.
I’ve spent close to two decades working on Anki. Please take a moment to consider how your comments might make me feel.
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Please take a lot of moments to consider how to make beginner-friendly UI.
It’s a bit insensitive ngl.
They’ve been super helpful thus far. There are a lot of cases in which trying to explain something verbally is either less efficient, less appropriate, or downright confusing or frustrating for users in a way that a visual step-by-step walkthrough has proven to be very useful.
The initial starting point was troubleshooting for users with common Ankihub issues (how to subscribe to/install a deck on Ankihub, how to match school-specific tags for a given deck, etc.), but has also proven useful for introducing users to more basic functions (custom-filtered decks, adding tags, restoring from a backup, etc.). Unsurprisingly, plenty of users that are new to Ankihub are also, commonly, at varying stages of being relatively new to Anki as a whole and so their support needs often overlap considerably.
One of the key details is that the tutorials are editable and easily updatable, which makes adjusting or improving them trivially easy. n=1 but it’s made helping people, guiding, troubleshooting, far smoother and easier (and more scalable). My personal experience has been that it makes resolving issues easier on my end, seems to be more intuitive and satisfying on the user end, scales well and is easily shared/disseminated.
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You definitely have a point, but I feel the pros outweigh the cons. We can (and do) tell users upfront that these are unconventional cards. And we can be even more clear to warn people not to consider these examples of how they should use Anki in practice. Also, AnkiHub can be used to maintain it, of course. And I think AI is good enough at this point to at least bootstrapped translations which could be independently maintained. There is probably a better way to do this where we maintain a single deck with all translations and the user can select their language when installing it.
We got really good feedback from med students at Dartmouth this year. I’ll ask someone else to chime in as well. They’ve been great to have from a CS perspective.
I would much rather see the look on Damien’s face if the Anki nerds came together to make Anki even better than it already is, and even better than any of us imagined it could possibly be!
Damien, you are a legend and we love you and Anki.
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I can attest to this as well.
Users prefer step-by-step visual tutorials rather than text tutorials. They also tend to ask less questions afterward about certain steps that might be confusing
Some common non-AnkiHub ones we commonly use are:
Custom filtered deck: How to Build a Custom-Filtered Deck
How to restore from a backup: How to Restore From Backup
How to unsuspend cards: Selecting and Unsuspending Cards by Tag
How to delete empty cards: How to Delete Empty Cards
We have a library of tutorials here you can check out (a lot are AnkiHub-related, but building these tutorials are very very easy): 🎥 Tutorials - AnkiHub Community
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From a purely “How much work is required” point of view, having 2 layouts (Beginner/Advanced) is much easier to implement since you’re not adding a lot of new code, you’re just adding a toggle and 3 strings; “Choose layout”, “Beginner” and “Advanced”. The only issue is that nobody will agree on which features are for advanced users and which can be easily understood by a beginner.
Still, adding one toggle and three strings (plus some backend code, obviously) is way less time-consuming than making dozens, if not hundreds of cards AND translating all of them. Plus, it doesn’t take extra studying time for the user, whereas a deck would. Time spent on cards about Anki itself is time not spent on cards that the user actually cares about.
So nothing < pre-made deck based on the manual < Beginner/Advanced layout toggle, with Beginner being the default
It’s a cooperation problem, not a technical problem - it’s about agreeing which features are for advanced users. Unfortunately, cooperation problems are harder to solve since money and/or extra workers don’t help.
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Damien’s work is almost 100% voluntary, I think you should be more grateful to him instead of making absurd demands. Think about it, who would make Anki free and open source like that? I don’t think there is a more altruistic person than him today, who does so much and still doesn’t get as much recognition.
Programming is not easy, you know that, Anki’s code is very large and it takes time to make adjustments to the system and fix things, so we need to be patient, besides Anki has several addons that can help beginners.
Even simpler addons take time to fix, imagine Anki that has a large code and that needs to be tested with each update.
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I run one application (VueScan) that has three modes (Basic/Advanced/Professional). They differ at the level of options that are available for performing a scan. As a user, I have only a vague understanding why certain options are only available in one or two of the three modes. Changing the Anki UI in two different modes is certainly not the end of confused users, as people will miss options they have seen elsewhere without knowing about the UI modes. The „advanced mode“ will still be something that is heavily promoted by YouTube pundits (TEN MOST SECRET ANKI SETTINGS THAT WILL CHANGE STUDYING FOREVER), so new users will be exposed to it.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not completely opposed to the idea. However, I believe it requires a great deal of preparation and communication.
PS: Please consider apologising to dae. Without his long dedication we wouldn’t talk about this constantly evolving software in the way we are. Maybe none of us would use it and maybe there would be no alternative platform. Besides, he’s just a nice guy.
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I don’t hear this word much outside my country so not sure if it isn’t used elsewhere, but if someone talks about being hurt about something you said and your response is something like “Please take a lot of moments to consider how to make beginner-friendly UI.” that’d be considered gaslighting. I think we should respond with sympathy.
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I believe everyone possesses their own strengths and weaknesses. Even if I was locked into a room for a month to design a beginner-friendly UI, I would ultimately produce a shitty interface, leaving me bored, exhausted, and overwhelmed.
This also highlights the beauty of open-source. Without access to Anki’s code, FSRS would not have achieved its current popularity, and Anki would still be using SM-2.
Last but not least, I’m not good at explaining FSRS, too. I’m grateful to you for all your writings about FSRS.
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Alright, I didn’t want to comment in this topic anymore, but I guess here I am.
Has Dae implemented a Beginner/Advanced layout or agreed to do so in the foreseeable future? No.
Has Dae made an onboarding deck or an interactive tutorial, or agreed to do so in the foreseeable future, or promised to work on his own alternative that is conceptually similar to those two? No.
Has Dae implemented any suggestion from this topic (UI changes to prevent users from mistakenly using “Hard” as a failing grade, like “Again”) and its replies, or agreed to do so in the foreseeable future, or promised to work on his own idea that aims to solve the “misusing Hard” problem and wasn’t among the replies there? No.
Will I apologize to Dae for what I said earlier today? No.
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You also didn’t implement any of that, and yet nobody is complaining about you.
If you are unhappy because nobody implemented what you want, remember that this is open source and you can do it yourself, and that these ideas may not be actually good and shouldn’t be implemented in the first place.
If you want people to help you, try helping them.
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Do you pay Damien’s salary? No
Have you tried to do something similar with Anki? No
So there is no logical reason to charge him for it
If you are dissatisfied, just learn to program and make a program that you like
When I didn’t know how to make addons, I wasn’t satisfied with the ones that existed, so I taught myself how to create addons. I didn’t have a mentor, I went after my goals, I researched, I read the manual several times, I asked chatgpt for help, I made mistakes several times until I got it right and then I managed to do it
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Just a neutral 0.02 as someone who is very grateful and appreciative of Anki and much of its community: it’s disappointing, and disheartening, to see this degree of (arguably unnecessary) antagonism.
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