This is perhaps the same issue as Custom insertion order for new cards, though I’m not entirely sure. What I want is to be able to somehow specify in advance the order in which a downloader of a shared deck will see new cards.
As I understand, the ‘default’, ‘natural’, or ‘fundamental’ order of a deck is something like the cards in the order that they were added to the deck, or perhaps created. What I mean by the ‘default’ order is the order that you would get on selecting ‘Insertion Order: Sequential’.
Now, assume I would like to share a deck I made with the numbers 1 to 10 in some foreign language. And suppose that I naturally wish for anyone downloading the deck to be shown the cards (new cards) in proper order. That is, on starting the deck they would first see 1, and then 2, and then 3, and so on.
But perhaps for some reason I didn’t create the cards (or notes) in chronological order. For idiosyncratic reasons I created 9 first, and then 3, and then 7, or something like that. Say they are created in the order 9, 3, 7, 5, 1, 2, 8, 4, 6, 10.
My understanding of the current state of things is that if I share that deck, any downloader has only two options:
- Choose Insertion Order Sequential, and learn the cards in the order 9, 3, 7…, or
- Choose Insertion Order Random, and learn the cards in random order.
Of course I would like them to have a third option, learning the cards in numerical order, 1 to 10, but that can’t be done (except by the trick described below). Is that correct?
Now, I understand that if I indexed the cards somehow (say, from 1 to 10), then it’d be reasonably trivial for the downloader to get themselves the cards in the right order by sorting the cards by index in the browser, and then using reposition. But this creates something of a burden on the downloader that I find undesirable. So I’m asking if there’s some way to change the default order from the uploading end.
The only way I know how to do it is to export the notes as text, rearrange them in the desired order in Excel, and then reimport them, which essentially just creates an entirely new deck. This feels janky and weird.
Moreover, I can’t do this reimportation trick on my own profile, as Anki won’t allow me to import duplicates of notes I already have. That is, I can’t have both my original 937 deck (which perhaps I have scheduling information on) and a clean new reordered 123 deck in the same profile. So in order to share a reordered deck, I need to create a new AnkiWeb account solely for that purpose.
The direct questions are, then:
- Is the only (vanilla) way to alter a deck’s fundamental order this goofy export-import new deck trick?
- Must I then create a new profile/account to host and share that new, reordered deck?
- Are there any add-ons that allow me to avoid all this by editing the creation date/order added of notes directly? And in particular, in bulk according to some variable? (E.g., spoofing the creation dates of the number cards based on numerical order.)
I feel as though I must be missing something, since this issue seems like it must affect almost everybody who shares a deck.
Thanks.