The BIG News (Anki + AnkiHub)
Hi everyone!
If you haven’t heard the exciting news - Anki is growing up! Damien, the creator of Anki, recognized our unique position to help maintain and improve Anki while preserving what makes it so special. This is an enormous opportunity to work towards exciting goals like polishing the UI/UX experience and improving the add-on ecosystem.
Thank you all so much for your support. We couldn’t have done this without you!
We encourage you to read the full announcement here!
Faster Improvements to Anki
In addition to working with existing Anki contributors, we’ve dedicated a team to focus entirely on Anki. They’ll be reviewing community contributions and fixes so they can be reviewed and released faster, helping deliver long-awaited improvements to users. We’ll share more in the next announcement about what’s on the roadmap for improving Anki. Stay tuned!
Anki Research Projects
Formalizing Memory Models
Have you ever wished Anki’s scheduling algorithm were more “aware” of the content on your cards? We’ve begun a new research initiative to make reviews more pleasant and reduce the study time required to achieve your learning goals.
Read our first research post here, authored by Giacomo Randazzo and Aidan Campbell. 
You’ll be able to try improved scheduling algorithms that better understand what you know and how well you know it. They’ll be more considerate in curating your review experience, taking into account factors like when and in what order new cards are introduced, and how knowing one card impacts your knowledge of another.
This project is still in its early stages. We’re distilling the existing literature into a theoretical framework others can build on, to accelerate progress and increase interest in spaced repetition research. We’re also training models, building benchmarks, and improving tooling.
This new research initiative is part of a long-term commitment to improving the learning experience for Anki users. We’ll share updates as the work progresses, and introduce the researchers leading the project in our next announcement!
What does this mean for you?
This project is about researching a context-aware spaced repetition system. Instead of scheduling cards based only on whether you got them right or wrong, the researchers want the scheduler to also understand the content and relationships between cards. The simplest example is the annoying experience of seeing two related cards back-to-back that are basically the same fact in reverse, such as “What is the capital of Italy?” followed by “Rome is the capital of what country?” A context-aware system could recognize that overlap and make sure the second card doesn’t show up near the first one, to avoid wasting your time. More broadly, they want to see whether understanding card meaning, similarity, and topic structure could improve scheduling, reduce leeches, and present new material in an order that actually teaches you instead of feeling random.
This could lead to an Anki experience that feels much smarter and less grindy: better ordering of new cards, fewer redundant reviews, more useful handling of hard cards, and faster learning from massive shared decks like AnKing. The researchers’ initial plan is to study anonymized review histories from lots of students using the same deck – the AnKing Step Deck turns out to be the best possible deck for this! With that data, they’ll be able to see patterns across shared cards, then test improvements both offline and through lightweight experiments delivered via the add-on.
Ultimately, they want to make Anki feel less like a blind scheduler and more like a system that actually understands what you are learning.
What’s been cooking at AnkiHub
Better Search and Study Experience
We rolled out improvements to Smart Search that help users find the right notes faster.
- Improved Smart Search Results (Precision & Recall): The Smart Search pipeline was overhauled with a new hybrid search and re-ranking implementation with LLM-based result filtering. We also fixed an issue where SmartSearch could stall out and fail to return results!
- Improved Datasets, Evals, and Experiments: We have been focused on leveling up our approach to systematically evaluating and improving smart search results.
- For the curious, we are working closely with the amazing applied research lab, MixedBread, to improve our LLM-based features!
- Save time when studying with the new “Clear all” button for Study Aids.
- Still in flight: better document parsing and smarter retrieval to further improve search accuracy. This will ensure we capture the complex details in your lecture slides, such as tables, diagrams, and images, and find more relevant notes.
We’d love your feedback on how well things are working! You can give us feedback on individual search results by hitting the thumbs up button, and you can give us general feedback about how it’s been going for you on our community forum here.
Improving Support and Reducing Friction
Our wonderful support team continues efforts to help ensure all of you can get set up and studying without unnecessary friction.
If you need any help with getting set up with Anki or AnkiHub, feel free to reach out on the community forum and we’ll help you ASAP!
As part of this ongoing effort, we’ll be releasing an in-Anki helper/tour feature that will show you how to use Anki as you’re getting started. We’ll be releasing this soon and will share more in our next announcement.
Improved Deck Maintainer Experience
- Community Integration Made Resilient to Name Changes: The Community integration now handles deck name and username changes gracefully, so forum groups and categories stay in sync even when names are updated!
- Bulk Suggestion Acceptance Fix: Resolved a limitation that prevented maintainers from accepting more than 1,000 bulk suggestions at a time.
- AnkiHub Deck Maintainers can now see who liked a suggestion, improving collaboration and further connecting our community.
- Note Suggestion Form Validation: Improved validation on the note suggestion form.
- Sidebar Links in Suggestion Queue: Maintainers can now open links in a sidebar directly from the AnkiHub suggestion queue, streamlining the review process!
Anki Add-On Improvements
- Fixed Client Test Failures: Resolved test failures in the Anki desktop add-on.
- Shadow DOM Fix for Suggestion Pages: Added shadow-content support to new note and delete note suggestion pages.
Backend Improvements
Faster and more reliable for users, better long-term product health
- The core backend framework (Django) was upgraded to its latest version, meaning better security, fewer bugs, and a more stable foundation going forward
- Faster testing and QA workflows mean issues get caught and fixed sooner before they reach you
- Things to keep Anki healthy long-term:
- Old, unused code was cleaned up, reducing the surface area for bugs
- The build and deployment infrastructure was streamlined, meaning faster releases with less risk
Improved Membership Features
- Sales Tax Integration & Checkout Redesign: AnkiHub now calculates and displays sales tax at checkout. The checkout page has been completely redesigned with a new payment summary view, promo code support, scholarship flow, and the ability to manage payment methods.
- Invoice Generation for One-Time Payments: Users who make one-time payments now receive proper invoices.
- Annual Payment Reminders for Organization Owners: We now send automatic payment reminders for annual org subscriptions.
Bug Fixes
As usual, we’ve also shipped tons of bug fixes that you may or may not notice. For the curious, here are the dirty details.
Bug Fixes
- Media Downloaded Despite Protected Field — Fixed an issue where media was being downloaded even when in a field protected by the user.
- Customer Cancellation Not Reflected — Resolved a bug where customer cancellations were not being properly reflected in the system.
- Subscription Display Issues — Fixed a bug where the “Subscribe” button was shown instead of “Subscribed” on already-subscribed decks, and resolved various issues with subscriptions being inactive or not converting properly from core to premium.
- Subscriber Count Cache Issues — Fixed caching issues that caused inaccurate subscriber counts
- Inconsistent Subscribe/Unsubscribe on Explore Page — Fixed inconsistent behavior when subscribing and unsubscribing on the Explore page, and resolved errors on clicks after selecting filters.
- Multiple Frontend Error Fixes — Resolved several JavaScript errors including: showToast is not defined, TypeError on study property reads, driver.reset is not a function, totalFlashcardsSelected is not defined, innerHTML TypeError in shadow DOM, and a Span Id 404 bug.
- “Show Source” Not Rendering in Firefox — Fixed an issue where the “Show source” content wasn’t displaying correctly in Firefox.
- Study Aids Tab Removed from MCAT Deck — The Study Aids tab was removed from the MCAT deck where it was not applicable.
- Results Table Infinite Scroll Bug — Fixed a bug with infinite scrolling in the results table.
- Smart Search Button Positioning — Fixed weird positioning of the Smart Search button.
- TypeError When Deleting Filtered Deck — Resolved a crash that occurred when deleting a filtered deck.
- Discourse Notification Fix — Likes and comments on AnkiHub suggestion posts now correctly trigger Discourse notifications.
- High RAM Usage with Suggestions — Fixed excessive memory consumption when reviewing a large number of suggestions.
- Planned Maintenance Error Message — Resolved a bug that incorrectly displayed a “planned maintenance” error message.
- User Name/ID Cleared from Config — Fixed an issue where user name and ID were getting cleared from the add-on config.
- File Upload UI During Search — Disabled the file upload UI during search to prevent duplicate API calls.
- GeneratorExit Error — Fixed a backend GeneratorExit error.
The AnKing Step Deck
The AnKing Step Deck continues to evolve with key updates that will help keep the deck accurate, well-organized, and easier to study.
Take a look at some of what team AnkiHub has been working on in February:
- 55,163 note updates pushed
- New Tag Releases and Updates:
- Only_Step tags project
- Medical TV Show tag project - The Pitt and House
- Improvements to the tag tree organization for easier navigation
- 52+ new illustrations added by @AhmedAfifi, @Mujeeb, & @thuthiii (see below!)
One last note…
Does this update sound a little bit different?
Hi! I’m Katie 
AnkiHub’s newest team member. I’m a Mainer, a personal trainer, and a passionate explainer of things that help people learn better. Going forward, you’ll be hearing from me more regularly. These announcements will still include the usual deck updates and releases, but there will be even more surprises tossed in! Surprises like the photo below - meet Finn, my 5-year-old pup who loves a cozy day on the coast. He’ll be popping in every now and again to say “hi!” and wish you luck with your studies.
Thank you to everyone in this community for being such engaged learners who contribute feedback, tags, illustrations, and improvements. I’m so excited to get started and help build the best learning journey possible for our Anki and AnkiHub family.
If you have questions, qualms, or quality jokes, just reply to this post. The team and I actually read them (we promise).
Chat soon,
Katie, Finn & the AnkiHub team 
