V3 scheduler new cards and Custom Study behavior: question/requests

Anki Suggestions
1

There’s a lot of things I like about the v3 scheduler, especially including learning cards in the review limit and being able to undo more consistently. I’d like to switch to v3 to help beta test and take advantage of those features, but after trying it for one day the way new cards are handled means I’m staying on v2 for now.

Questions:

  1. Will v2 continue to be supported after v3 comes out of beta?
  2. Can v3 have features to be able to accommodate my workflow, as noted in Requests?
  3. If not, is there a way to adjust my workflow use already planned/implemented features for v3? (even if v2 will continue to be supported, I do want the other improvements listed above, and am happy to be a beta tester)

Requests:

  1. Opt in/out switch for subsubdecks’ new card limits being limited by parent deck new cards if selected from a grandparent deck. I do see from other posts that this is an architectural limitation and there’s no plan to have a opt-in/out switch on this so this list item is mostly to say that such an opt-in/out switch would be nice.
  2. Opt-in/out switch for new cards being limited by review limit? I know I’m going to do all my reviews and have time for new cards, but my review card limit is slightly lower than the total number of review cards (see my workflow below) and I prefer to have new cards mixed in with review cards. I suspect this is going to get a “no” for similar reasons to there being no plans for a similar switch for subsubdecks not being limited by their parent decks, but I am still asking just in case it would make more sense than the other one.
  3. Most importantly, Could there be a Custom Study option to allow X new cards for that day separately from increasing the review limit? Currently, with the v3 scheduler, if I see 0 new cards because of the review limit, and I use Custom Study to increase the new card limit by X, I still see 0 new cards. Even when all the review cards in the deck have been done for the day, if I want to see more new cards using Custom Study, I need to also increase the review card limit, even if I can’t use Custom Study to increase the review card limit because there are no review cards left in the deck. I think this would have to be a separate option from the “increase new card limit” option. (I don’t think a filtered deck works for me here, partly because I want my new cards mixed with my review cards, and partly because I want to avoid tagging specific new cards for filtering every day.)

My current v2 scheduler workflow for context (slightly edited and simplified, feel free to ignore):
Anki version 2.1.48 (also 2.0.79 (20079.1) on ankimobile)
Decks:

  • Everything (100 new limit, 200 review limit) - see bottom section
  • - Casual (20 or 0 new limit depending on how busy I am, 200 review limit)
  • - - Subsubdeck 1 (2 new limit, 200 review limit)
  • - - Subsubdeck 2 (5 new limit, 200 review limit)
  • - - Subsubdeck 3 (3 new limit, 200 review limit)
  • - - Subsubdeck 4 (5 new limit, 200 review limit)
  • - - A couple more subsubdecks, but there’s usually only 3-4 at any given time that have new cards. About half of these are shared decks that I want to keep updated and so can’t be consolidated.
  • - Important (20 new limit that is always reached, 200 review limit)
  • - - Work (10 new limit, 200 review limit)
  • - - School (10 new limit, 200 review limit)

Learning/relearning steps:

  • 1m 10m 1d (so I see about 250-60 reviews when I open up Anki for the first time each day)
  • Learning/new cards mixed (I found this extraordinarily helpful since learning a lot of new cards at once is really taxing).

Reviews and workflow:

  • I study from the Everything deck.
  • The Casual subdeck goes in an option group for 20 new cards if life is going well, or an otherwise-identical one for 0 new cards if life is busy. This is the reason for request 1 above.
  • I usually have about 50-150 “excess” review cards a day. Funny thing is, I’ve found that I do all the “excess” review cards 95% of the days, but I’ve only been doing that many since I limited the Everything deck to 200. This the reason for requests 2 and 3 above.
  • I think knowing I only have to do 200 (~250 with learning cards in v2) means that it feels like a manageable number and I can feel done for the day, but since I have momentum going I use Custom Review to review all the rest of the learning and doing the others feels like a bonus.
  • When I’ve tried setting the limit to 400, I get discouraged and finish my reviews less often - it just feels like a much larger number.
2
  • The v3 scheduler will eventually become the sole scheduler
  • Custom study will get an update in the future so that it factors in the review limit when extending the number of review cards
  • An option to partially or completely ignore the review limit for new cards may come in a future update
1 Like
3

Thank you.

Question for clarification, when you say

Do you mean that custom study will factor in the review limit when extending the number of new cards? Or am I misunderstanding something about the way Custom Study for the number of review cards interacts with the review limit?

4

If custom study just increased the new limit, it would have no effect if the review limit had already been exceeded. So it either needs to warn the user, or provide an option to automatically increase the review limit at the same time so that the desired number of extra new cards become available. Even then that doesn’t guarantee they’ll be shown though, as it will depend on the order cards are shown.

5

I honestly HATE that my review limit caps my new card limit and that there’s no way to turn it off. Anki worked fantastic for me for years through school and the only reason I ever updated past 2.1 was because I was informed by pop-up that V1 scheduler was going to be unsupported on future mobile updates. V1 + Hoochie add-on packs did exactly what I wanted them to do and I was perfectly happy with how it was previously working, and now having to upgrade to the new scheduler has completely derailed my studies.

V2 scheduler isn’t an option because of the issues with deck inheritance such that the parent deck doesn’t respect subdeck limits. V3 fixes this but forces me into this new set of issues. Please, please, PLEASE prioritize the option to ignore review limits for new cards so that I can get back to the Anki I know and love!

Sincerely,
A long-time, now heartbroken fan

1 Like
6

Could you help us better understand your workflow? Do you have a backlog of reviews? Why is increasing the daily limit not an option?

7

First, thank you so much for your reply! I am happy to detail my Anki usage:

My background: I started using Anki my first year of medical school. Graduated #1 in my class and scored >99th percentile on all 3 licensing exams. When people ask me how I did it, I literally just refer them to Anki.

My previous setup: V1 scheduler + Hoochie add-ons. Worked perfectly, did exactly what I wanted. Allowed me to study from a single parent deck with multiple subdecks but randomize my news/reviews amongst all my subdecks. Honestly froze my system years ago and would never have upgraded if it weren’t for Anki Mobile retiring V1 scheduler support :frowning:

My Anki usage: I use a mix of cards that I made myself and premade study decks that are available in my field from large-scale collaborations on the internet. For a variety of reasons, I don’t always want or have to use the “recommended” review limit for my number of new cards. For example, for the cards I make myself, I want to be most conservative/rigorous with learning them so I set a higher review:new ratio to make sure that I’m getting through all my cards every day without overloading myself. For decks that I download from the internet, I oftentimes want a lower review:new ratio. This can be for a variety of factors including the fact that these “open source” decks are oftentimes supplementary to the cards I make myself or they are in some ways partially review/less deserving of a more rigorous review:new ratio. In these cases, just “getting through” the new cards at a faster pace is more beneficial to me than churning out all of my reviews at the recommended schedule, and I’d rather have a sampling of my reviews per day as these decks may be less intensive/faster, require lower memory load, etc. Doesn’t mean I don’t want to see/do these cards obviously, just that I want to be able to set my scheduling workloads for these decks differently based on how I’ve determined I’d like to optimize my learning and time.

As to why I cannot increase my daily limit - my schedule is highly structured at this point in my career. I do Anki every single day but I am highly reliant on it taking a very specific amount of time every day. I have carefully titrated how many cards I can/want to do per day over multiple years such that I know exactly how many news and reviews from each deck I want to do every single day.

Why V1 + Hoochie worked great: I could study from a single parent deck with multiple subdecks, and in some cases multiple sub-sub decks. Limits that I set on subdecks and sub-subdecks were respected by the parent decks, yet I could randomize the new/review cards I saw across all of my subdecks so that I wasn’t just studying one single deck at a time.

Why V2 scheduler was a dealbreaker: subdeck and sub-subdeck limits weren’t respected by the parent deck. Again, I really rely on setting strict new/review card limits for each subdeck (and in some cases, sub-subdecks). This is because I could on a very granular level parse out how much representation I wanted from say my own personal/custom cards vs. cards from decks I wanted to learn less rigorously, all while staying within my allotted daily Anki time commitment.

Why V3 scheduler was an improvement: subdeck limits were again respected by the parent deck. Sub-subdeck limits not being respected by parent decks is an inconvenience, especially for large pre-made decks that I have downloaded that are organized by topic in sub-subdecks. While parent decks respecting sub-subdeck limits would be ideal, consolidating these pre-made decks into a single subdeck of my parent deck isn’t too terribly arduous and thus this isn’t necessarily a dealbreaker per se.

That being said, not being able to decouple my new card limit from my review limit is hugely detrimental to my learning with Anki, for reasons thoroughly outlined above. Again, I would honestly have never updated if V1 support wasn’t being phased out because I was so happy with the previous scheduling behavior. Forcing us into this new scheduling behavior without an option to “opt out” from new cards being limited by review limit feels really heavy-handed and doesn’t give me the personal control over my studying that I want and need. I’m not saying that it might not be beneficial for certain people in different situations - but I think what we truly need is the flexibility to tailor our study experiences rather than being forced to have it one way or the other.

Really appreciate your consideration - thank you, and please, please consider giving us more flexibility on how we use this wonderful, revolutionary app.

8

Thank you for taking the time to elaborate. I have added a ticket tracking this issue here: Consider providing a way to bypass review limits on new cards · Issue #1834 · ankitects/anki · GitHub

Also please note that the handling of intermediate deck limits changed recently: The 2021 scheduler - Frequently Asked Questions

9

Thank you so much! Looking forward to this feature being implemented in coming updates.

With regard to handling of intermediate deck limits - I’ve personally had some bugs with it. My experience has been that subdeck limits are respected by the parent deck but sub-subdeck limits are not. The way that it is described in the FAQ would honestly be perfect.

10

It’s possible a bug has slipped through, or it may be a misunderstanding. Intraday learning cards are not subject to the limit for example. If you think more cards have come from a deck than you expect should, you should be able to search for ‘deck:“deck name” rated:1’ in the browse screen to see the cards in that deck that were answered that day, which should help you confirm your suspicions. If you’ve found a bug, please let me know the steps required to reproduce it (I can grab a copy of your AnkiWeb collection to test with).