Hi I have been using Anking for a while and I have a lot more blank cards compared to my friends. For example, for BB psychology > anxiety disorders, I have a total of 67 cards (whereas my friend has 69) and I have 8 blank cards with nothing on them compared to my friends 3 blank cards. Why do I have so many blank cards and why are the numbers in each deck different?
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Hello,
Let’s break it down into a couple of different things:
This is always a tough one, because it’s hard to tell, at a glance, what the history is for your friend’s collection/s. Did they add cards, delete cards, did they start of with or inherit an older version of the deck, did you?
All of these things are factors that are potentially at play. Without more information about your friend’s collection, it’s very difficult (to impossible) to give information about why their collection/s might be different than yours.
Let’s start off from the basics here: can you help me understand which tag you’re referencing? There is a BnB tag for Psych and Anxiety Disorders for Step 1, and a separate one for Step 2. The better idea I have of which tag you’re inquiring about, the easier it will be for me to help. 
Even better if you can select the tag in question from your Browse screen and send me a screencap of your whole screen, so I can see what you’re seeing.
From what I can see, you have blank cards in your collection because, it seems, that you have protected all of your fields on Ankihub:
Since you’ve protected all fields, AnkiHub can’t write to any of the fields. The end result, here, is that some of your cards are blank because the field is protected and AnkiHub can’t fill them in. :-).
Let me know what helps, what other questions you have, and we’ll go from there.
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Thank you for you reply
Thank you for your reply, as you can see from my screenshot there are so many blanks. If I want to have the cards do I just need to unprotect them? Also sorry for not clarifying but its for step 1
How do I unprotect the cards?
Yep, fairly certain this is due to having all of the fields protected.
Yeah, in order for AnkiHub to be able to fill in the cards at all you’ll have to unprotect the fields you want it to be able to write to.
This tutorial can walk you through how to protect, or uprotect, a field: Managing Protected Fields
Once you’ve done that, you can hit sync. Sometimes that’s sufficient. In some cases, though, you’ll have to ‘push’ a verification check against the server in order to trigger it to pull all the adjustments. In that case, you can follow this tutorial: Resetting Local Changes
Let me know how/if that does the trick and we’ll go from there.
Okay, just wondering is there any drawbacks/progress changes if I unprotect everything? just confused what this does
I just followed your advice and unprotected all the fields, now the number of cards in Anxiety Disorders went down from 67 to 65 (compared to my friends 69) and I have blank cards
im also just trying to make sure that I have the right number of cards in my step 1 deck overall
Protecting the field does about what it sounds like; it protects that field (so that AnkiHub can’t edit or adjust it).
Let’s say, for example, that you like to make a ton of edits to your ‘Extra’ field. If you make edits, and you don’t protect that field, there is a very high likelihood that AnkiHub will eventually overwrite those edits.
If you make edits, and you do protect that field, those edits that you made will be protected and AnkiHub cannot overwrite them.
So there is a time and a place for protecting a field; which ones you do, or don’t, protect are up to you based on whatever edits (if any) that you want to make.
All of that is to say: if you have edits you want to keep, that might be a reason to keep a field protected. However, you can’t have it both ways: you can’t both protect a field and preserve your edits and have AnkiHub fill that field.
Did you do the second part? Pushing a check against the server copy?
I wouldn’t sweat your friend’s number, as we don’t have a basis for comparison there. Could be that they have too many cards, or wrong cards; no way to be sure without more info.
Also: I show in the image you shared that you’re clicking on the Step2 tag. It was my understanding that you were inquiring about Step1? Want to make sure we’re on the same page.
You can click on this tag and let me know how many cards you have present, total:
Sorry youre right I was looking in the wrong place, let me try pushing a checl
Thank you so much, All those cards are actual cards, I cant believe ive been suspending them this whole time. Other than that, I just want to make sure I have the right total number of cards. Also Should I unprotect these fields aswell?
As a general rule, only leave protected a few things:
Leave protected:
- FA
- Lecture/Personal Notes
- Missed Questions
- BnB
- Anything you might edit yourself
There are reasons for the above, but they’re not super important
Did you click on the step1 tag? How many cards came up?
69 cards came up
If you want to check the total number of cards in your deck, we’ll have to check further up the chain.
To check the number of cards in your deck as a whole, you’ll want to click here:
Yup, you actually have more cards than you need. You likely also have some old cards from earlier version/s of the deck. Not a big deal, ultimately, but you for sure have enough cards.
I have 32620 in anking V12
I have another problem now, it seems like the cards that I had suspended (because I thought they were blank) are now having cloze errors,
do you know why this may be the case?
actually sorry these were cards that I had and was doing before, they had every term clozed and now its saying cloze error
Sounds like you’re all set.
I’m not sure if I follow?
But, you can use the Empty Cards Tool as indicated in message:
After following your instructions, the cards that were blank before are no longer blank. However, some of the cards before now are having CLOZE errors