Today we’re thrilled to roll out a feature that totally revamps how discussions around note suggestions work on AnkiHub!
Heads up! This is a beta release, exclusively available to AnKing Deck maintainers for now. We’ll open it up to everyone once we’ve gathered and acted on your crucial feedback, ensuring a seamless experience for all.
This is a Discourse-based forum. Discourse is an incredible, well-loved, trusted and professional piece of open-source software. It has an amazing range of powerful features which is why we built the AnkiHub ↔ Forum integration with Discourse. We are hoping that having the power of Discourse in your hands will make your life as a Deck maintainer or contributor more enjoyable.
Here’s the Scoop
From now on, when you kick off a suggestion for a note, a corresponding topic on the forum will magically appear!
Feel free to @ mention the suggestion author or other AnkiHub users using their AnkiHub username.
This is available whether you’re commenting from AnkiHub or the forum.
Tip: the suggestion author is displayed on the suggestion
Any edits to the suggestion? They’ll be automatically reflected in the forum topic.
We’ll slap on a tag to the forum topic to show the status of the suggestion (whether it’s pending, rejected, or accepted.)
Deck maintainers can delegate by assigning other maintainers to forum topics.
Use forum tags to further categorize suggestions.
Your forum usernames will stay in sync with your AnkiHub usernames. Some usernames had to be modified in order to be compatible with the username rules that are used by the forum.
Is somebody being naughty? You can flag a suggestion for moderator attention. Learn how
What’s Still Cooking?
We were eager to get this first version of the new integration into your hands ASAP. That said, we know there’s room for improvement:
Everytime someone makes a suggestion, a discourse topic gets made? Or does only get made when someone comments (i accepted a few suggestions today and topics did not get created, so how will users get notified their suggestions get accepted?)
Really like this integration and the implementation so far! Echoing @Ahmed7 on whether each suggestion gets a Discourse post. Couple other things I’m noticing using it for the first time:
Liking a suggestion on AnkiHub doesn’t carry over to the Discourse page and vice versa; ideally, these would sync up. Is there a way to make the default reactions on Discourse thumbs up/down rather than the heart?
Commenting on AnkiHub seems a bit buggy (I’ll write a comment, hit publish, and nothing happens. Then ~15 seconds later I get the notification that the Discourse post has gone up and I have to refresh to find my comment on the suggestion.)
Once somebody has commented on AnkiHub, there’s no way to reply without opening the Discourse page; ideally, I’d still be able to reply in-line on AnkiHub, or be able to open a pop-up to comment on the Discourse post rather than open up a whole new tab
It would be nice to be able to like a comment on AnkiHub itself, for example, Cameron says “fixed spelling, support”. I would have to hit go to discussion, then like the comment or reply. If it was native on AnkiHub, it would be nice to be able to thumbs up the comment there without going to another site
Agree, noticing this as well
Agree too, being able to comment on AnkiHub will be much more seamless.
Also, it would be nice to be able to assign a post right away from AnkiHub. Also not sure how @'ing works on AnkiHub. Would I have to write out the users exact name with the @ so Discourse picks it up?
Also a way for the “added tag-anking-overhaul” to not show up in the comments on ankihub would be nice too
Forum topics get created only when somebody starts a conversation.
@pedroven, are we already somehow sending notifications to users if their suggestion is accept or rejected without a topic previously being created? If not, we can add this to our list of follow up tasks. This can be implemented by sending the user a PM.
Another question: is it possible to start a discussion on a suggestion after it has been rejected?
That’s a good point. It should be easy to make liking a suggestion on AnkiHub add a heart to the topic on the forum (if a topic exists) and to keep the number of hearts in sync with the number of likes. We can do the same for dislikes.
That’s good to know. We can look into improving the performance.
This one is a bit tricky and brings up some questions. The reason we didn’t do this is that there are many other features on the forum (e.g., tagging forum posts, assigning posts, whisper replies, flagging posts, etc.) and it’s probably going to be best for everyone to delegate most of this functionality to the forum rather than mirroring all of that functionality on AnkiHub. If we try to mirror all of the forum functionality it will take time away from developing other features and it will introduce a maintenance burden and more possibilities where bugs can appear. Our philosophy about this is sort of to avoid reinventing the wheel.
That said, we will definitely to continue thinking about how we can improve the integration while keeping it lean and manageable. It’s possible we can still keep the integration simple while supporting a limited range of additional features like replying inline. We just need to make sure it doesn’t introduce unwanted complexity and grow into a monster! Thanks for your feedback, @Cameron !
Not sure what you mean by this. @ mentioning should already work. Try typing @ when starting a discussion in AnkiHub and it will pull up the list of usernames. You can beginning typing the username and then press tab to select and autocomplete the name.
I think the auto replies are not working as expected and we’re looking into that.
This is arguably the most important feature, all the rejections have a rejection reason which the users need to read in order to prevent submitting subpar suggestions
I used to try to track this with a imgur link, in one month and 100s-1000s of rejections in that period, it only had like 3 views
First off congrats! I know this was a long time coming and took a lot of hard work!
1 thing i noticed is that i’ll have unread notifications abt suggestions but when I click them I see that they were already accepted. Is there a way to have the notification go away if it was accepted?
Another issue is when pressing comment, there is no confirmation that the comment has been posted unless you refresh or wait a while. Its not a satisfying commenting experience like how it is natively in Discourse. SOmetimes I comment and have to wait 10 seconds before pressing next page because Im unsure whether the comment was actually posted or not
Heads up! This is a beta release, exclusively available to AnKing Deck maintainers for now. We’ll open it up to everyone once we’ve gathered and acted on your crucial feedback, ensuring a seamless experience for all.
Some usernames had to be modified in order to be compatible with the username rules that are used by the forum.
Learn how
Let us know:
Thanks for your feedback, 
