Currently, when you go to the shared decks page on ankiweb (https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks), you’re prompted to either choose a category of deck or to do a search [image attached].
However, I’m specifically looking for a way to be able to see every deck that has been published on ankiweb - not just decks that belong to a certain category or search result. Is there a way to do this? Maybe there’s a shared deck index I can pull from somewhere?
I can see, for example, that the addons page on ankiweb is currently like this. The page (https://ankiweb.net/shared/addons) appears to be basically a flat index of all the addons that exist [image attached]
Also, I’m aware that this post may be a possible duplicate with Ankiweb Search: Search over all Decks but the exchange was relatively shallow and it dates from 2021, so I thought I’d make this post
No, there’s no way to do that. I’m struggling to think of any reason why any individual would need to do this that isn’t related to scraping and stealing data.
I’m struggling to think of any reason why any individual would need to do this that isn’t related to scraping and stealing data.
Well I can tell you exactly why I was wanting to do that. I was looking to see if there was a deck available to memorize all those ui/ux terms “kebab”, “accordion”, “modal”, etc. However, 1) there’s no category for this and 2) I feel that search currently is a bit limited for this.
(And fwiw, in order to scrape shared Anki decks, you don’t need a shared deck index. You could easily do it in other ways haha)
I’m not sure how a list of deck titles would help with that either though.
If there’s a word you think might be in the deck title (or deck tags) – user? interface? user interface? design? – search for that word. Be as general as possible and then you can text-search the page for something more specific.
You can also use the searches available on this Forum [in this “Shared Decks” category], on Reddit [in r/Anki], on Google [with the words “anki deck” – or else limited to site:ankiweb.net/shared]. There are lots of ways to find decks that have been shared, even if they aren’t published on our site.
Then it’s a good thing that’s not the only way the site protects itself!
These are good points and I should mention that I did, of course, do precisely the searches you recommended.
However, this still leaves the ankiweb shared decks pages hard to browse/explore. For example, I’m actually just genuinely curious about all the decks people are sharing on ankiweb and I don’t want to have to pigeonhole my exploration to the hard-coded categories or the current search bar.
Unfortunately usability here is impeded by two things:
There have been bad actors like the previously-named “AnkiPro” and similar that have downloaded large swathes of Anki’s shared decks, and republished them as their own, which we wish to discourage.
AnkiWeb’s search function is currently very simple, out of concerns for performance, so it can’t handle multiple search terms at once.
Would you consider adding a “Top Decks” category? It would be for all decks ranked top rated to lowest rated, just like how decks in the Chinese category, etc are ranked. It could even be paginated or maybe just limited to the top 250 decks?
I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on this. I’m also happy to open a seperate topic for this suggestion.
My main argument for why this could be a good feature is that it would allow those searching for decks (especially newcomers) to more effectively explore the different types of decks available to them and not just pigenonhole themselves into a narrow category/keyword.
