Hi,
So I was looking for Javanese shared decks and there wasn’t one. I then spent a bunch of time looking for a source of vocabulary that I could freely use, got a sample of the words checked by a native speaker and then converted them into a deck.
When I went to share this deck I noticed that two decks I shared years ago had been unshared due to a lack of activity. This made me wonder if I was even the first to share a Javanese deck. It is not a language that many people are interested in. The decks from years ago were Indonesian, a language with much more interest and even they got unshared. It seems that this system of unsharing decks without many downloads keeps decks about niche languages or subjects off the site. These are the kind of decks that are arguably the most useful (and most impressive to someone coming across them).
Is the low retention period due to server space issues, or to declutter ankiweb? Since everything is already syncing with ankiweb, I imagine it’s due to clutter. Perhaps we could have better categorisation (e.g. the ability to add language/other categories which get reviewed by an admin) and varying retention periods per category based on the number of decks within? It would be good to ensure that potentially useful decks for niche areas aren’t removed before someone has a chance to benefit from them. On the other hand I can see that very popular languages such as Spanish could probably do with this policy to retain the quality of shared decks.
Thanks for reading! If you require development resources to help with this, I’d be happy to donate some time.