Stop Anki From Suspending Leeches

Yeah, I know.  That’s a weird title.  Let me explain.

Anki keeps track of each card’s history, and especially of how many times you miss each card. If you miss the card a certain number of times, anki tags the card as a “leech” and then suspends it, which means that it won’t show up in your normal studying.

I guess the rationale is that you need to do some serious or different work with that card, but I would rather have the card tagged but continue to pop up in my normal studying rather than being buried. Even if I keep missing the card, it it keeps showing up every day, I’ll get it eventually.

I was studying today and saw a little note that a card had been marked as a leech and suspended, which is how I found out about it. Some rooting around behind the curtain in anki eventually showed me that about eight vocabulary cards had been suspended in this way! In other words, the cards that had given me the most trouble had been pulled from the deck, and I wasn’t seeing them!

After that, it took me quite a while to figure out how to undo this and how to prevent it from happening again. Here it is:

First, to find out if any of your cards have been suspended, click on “browse” at the to of the screen. This will open a large window pane with a list of words down the side. From that list, click on “suspended” and your suspended cards, if any, will show up. One of your options is to remove tags, so remove the tag “leech” on those cards.

To stop leeches from being suspended again, click on a deck just as if you were doing to study it. However, instead of clicking on “study now” go to the bottom of the screen and click on “options”. In the new box that appears, click on the “leeches” tab. One of your choices should be “leech actions” and the default setting is “suspend card”. You can click on it and change it to “tag only”. Now the card will be tagged a leech but won’t disappear from your deck. (Alternatively, you can go to “leech threshold” and set it to a higher number, allowing the leech to still be suspended but only after you miss it a much higher number of times, if that’s what you want.)

Of course, I was doing all of this instead of studying, so I’m going back to my vocabulary.

頑張って

Advertisements