AnkiHub Subdeck Error

I had an issue the other day with the new AnkiHub feature that supported subdecks.

I have a large deck for my medical school that is divided on my end by class, cycles (2 week stretches of material), and specific modules for each day of lectures. It goes pretty deep with the subdecks. Previously with AnkiHub due to lack of support of subdecks I had been tagging cards exactly how that fit in my subdeck system so others could suspend cards based on which modules that wanted to focus on.

With the release of subdeck support, I decided to enable them for this deck in the “subscribed decks” menu. After some waiting/loading menus, I found that all of my cards that had been previously suggested to the AnkiHub deck had been moved to a general “MASONDECK” deck (the name of the overall deck). All subdecks had been lost. This was frustrating as it would take hours to re-sort cards back into their respective subdecks. Luckily I had a backup saved so the subdecks were restored, but I lost progress on some cards I had done that day. Not a big deal but I was surprised by this. Any idea what my error was?

After restoring my backup, subdecks are still technically enabled for this deck in that subscribed decks menu. I don’t want to mess with those settings until we figure out what happened. Classmates who are subscribed to the deck do not have subdecks on their Anki profile. Where can I find more information on how to set this up correctly? Thanks for the help. Love this project and excited for the future.

1 Like

Apologies for the trouble that this caused you!

Currently there is no easy way add subdeck support for existing AnkiHub decks. It is only full supported for new decks you create.

The Enable Subdecks button is meant to be used by subscribers of a deck to enable the organization of notes into subdecks. This is only possible for decks that have subdeck tags. Deck owners and maintainers have the option to add subdeck tags to the deck when creating a deck. We will soon add an option for deck owners and maintainers to add subdeck tags to existing decks, based on the subdecks they have in their Anki collection.

You can read more about the subdeck feature here:

In the meantime we changed what happens when you enable subdecks for a deck to prevent the problem you had from happening. (Make sure you update the add-on to the newest version.) To understand why your notes were moved all moved to the main deck you have to know that subdecks are managed using subdeck tags that look like this: AnkiHub_Subdeck::Deck_Name::Subdeck_Name. Previously when a note had no subdeck tag, it was assumed to belong to the main deck (Deck_Name in this case).
Now notes without subdeck tags do not belong to any specific deck, so they don’t get moved when you enable subdecks (notes are moved to their subdeck when you enable subdecks for a deck.)

For now you can leave subdecks enabled for your deck, or disable it. When you disable it, a dialog will ask you if you want to delete subdecks (see the attached screenshot). Just press No.

1 Like