Team AnkiHub Updates -
Hi everyone! 
August has officially started! The Anki team has lots of exciting releases and updates to share from the last few weeks, lets dig in 
Anki Antics
Research Check In: This Spring we announced an exciting new research project - see original post here: Formalizing Memory Models. The research team working on this project has published another research note to show what they’ve been working on:
June Research Note: Comparing memory models on a 4B reviews dataset
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Summary: The team is testing different AI models to predict whether someone will remember a flashcard by using a huge dataset of real Anki study data. So far, our newest custom models are beating all the existing approaches (like the one Anki currently uses). We’re still double-checking the numbers before calling them final, but this is promising!
AnkiHub Now Stewards AnkiWeb: Now our team is helping Damien with incident-response processes, monitoring, and AnkiWeb maintenance. That means a dedicated on-call incident-response process, monitoring and alerting, and secure, modern infrastructure standing behind the service you rely on every day. Essentially, the tools you use are now maintained by a team that’s fully invested in keeping them reliable and improving them over time.
Passwordless AnkiWeb Account Creation: You can create an AnkiWeb account and sign in without a password - right from Anki desktop. Enter your email, and we’ll send you a 6-digit code for you to sign in. Signing up and signing in are now a short, easy flow all within the same place - no trips to the browser, no second password to remember.
Psst: if you prefer using a second password, the original workflow is still available!
What’s been cooking at AnkiHub
1. New User Onboarding
Native in-app tours
To better support new Ankihub users, we’ve shipped our first two native tours within Anki itself. No more bouncing between platforms or searching for support articles. These tours will help get newcomers to their first study session faster, smoother and more confidently.
AnkiWeb Conflict dialog fix
When new users encountered the preferences screen in AnkiWeb for the first time a confusing dialog box showed up forcing users to choose between three options with no clear path forward. This has been fixed! Logging in to AnkiWeb from Preferences no longer triggers the conflict dialog for new users who have nothing to sync yet, so new users can get to their first study session quicker than ever.
AnkiHub sync fix for new AnkiWeb users
AnkiWeb users new to AnkiHub would receive a “canceled” message when trying to sync with AnkiHub for the first time. There was a work around to solve this, but now the sync works right away! No workaround needed anymore!
2. Fields
Protected Fields
Losing personal edits to a sync’d deck has been one of the more painful experiences for our AnkiHub community. But now your note edits are fully yours - even for subscribed decks! Whenever you edit a field, it will now be automatically protected from any deck updates. No tags or extra steps to use this feature, your personal edits are simply safe from all future syncs.
Psst: You may also notice the related dialogs were also improved with this release!
3. Suggestion Improvements
Suggest-a-Change Flow Redesign
We’ve redesigned the suggest-a-change experience to make it easier to see what fields you’re submitting. The fields you don’t want to include are clearly visible and you can deselect from the same screen.
Bulk Suggestions
Have you ever submitted a bulk suggestion only for it to fail with no reason? We know how important bulk suggestions are to keeping our decks up-to-date and we want this process to be as easy as possible for deck maintainers. Bulk suggestions no longer fail all-or-nothing, valid suggestions are submitted even when some hit errors and you, the user, get a detailed summary of what worked and what didn’t.
5. File Upload - Smart Search
File Size Increase
The size limit for file uploads to Smart Search has been raised from 25 MB to 50 MB! Now you can bring your larger lecture slide decks and reference files to Smart Search. Users can now study directly from actual lecture materials without splitting or compressing files first.
Also, if you do go over the limit, you’ll now see a clear “file too large” message instead of a silent no-op.
Share Your Experience
Thank you to those who submitted feedback and offered to do a short interview! You will be hearing from our team shortly 
We’re still collecting stories from students and learners about their journey with Anki and AnkiHub. We want to know what’s working, what’s changed in how you study, and where you’ve seen the Anki Ecosystem make a real difference.
If Anki has been a meaningful part of your learning experience, we’d love to hear about it. We’re inviting a handful of community members for short, casual 20–30 minute conversations to better understand how people are actually using these tools.
No prep needed — just your honest experience.
Meet the Team
Customer Success - Brian B. Havens!
Brian ‌didn’t ‌exactly ‌take the straight line to AnkiHub. Rural Oklahoma was home, then came a stretch that reads like a grab bag of lives - sushi chef, a Spanish literature degree, two separate Teacher of the Year wins. After that he loaded up his dog, headed for New York City, and aimed at PT school, only to figure out that med school was the thing he’d been circling all along. These days, he’s a first-year medical student at Washington University in St. Louis.
AnkiHub showed up before he even sent in a med school application. While volunteering night shifts at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan, he spotted a deck-tagging challenge and - true to form - didn’t stop at the goal. He completed thousands of tags, became a fixture on the AnkiHub subreddit, and eventually became too hard to ignore. We brought him on board, and Brian has since worn just about every hat available: customer service, deck editing, backend testing, beta testing, and now serving as an informal AnkiHub ambassador at WashU.
Away from medicine, he’s been training martial arts for years, is deep into jiu-jitsu, and sticks to a simple idea: process beats product, every time.
We’re lucky he’s here!
One Last Note..
Last announcement we launched something new! We’ll pose a question to the AnkiHub community in these regular announcements – and then in the following post, we’ll share how the team answered!
Last month’s question: If your study style were a movie genre, what would it be?
- Top answer from the community: “Shakespearean Comedy - lots of disguises, confusion, and interwoven agendas before that “ah-ha!” and everything works out in the end.”
- Top Answers from the team: Horror, Murder Mystery, and Romantic Comedy (because Cani loves to study
)
Next Months Question: What’s the most chaotic tab you have open right now, and what do you think it says about you?
Be sure to reply below!
Chat soon, Katie & the AnkiHub team
Bug Fixes
Suggestions & maintainer workflow
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Bulk Actions Disappear After Opening Bulk ID Panel — Maintainers on the Community Suggestions page lost access to “Select all,” “Bulk discard,” and “Bulk merge” after clicking a Bulk ID link. This was a blocking issue in the review workflow and is now resolved.
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Bulk Discard Broken on Suggestions Page — Selecting suggestions and then triggering bulk discard silently failed. Now resolved.
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Two Users Editing the Same Suggestion — When two people acted on the same suggestion, the last action silently won. The app now shows a clear error when a suggestion was already merged or discarded by someone else.
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Cross-Deck Bulk Accept Collision — Unscoped suggestion IDs meant a bulk merge could accept change suggestions on the wrong deck. Suggestions are now correctly scoped so accepts apply only to the intended deck.
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Submit Suggestion Returned 405 — Submitting a suggestion from the Deck Details page failed with a “405 Method Not Allowed” error after a template regression. Submission works again.
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Suggestions Table Pagination Broken — Clicking “Next” on a notes table produced a malformed URL with no page number. Pagination is now correct.
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Long Tag Checkboxes Clipped in Suggestion Dialog — Long or deeply nested tag checkboxes had their last line cut off or overflowed sideways. Text now wraps and displays fully at any width.
Search, chatbot & study experience
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Smart Search Suspended/Unsuspended Filter Not Working — The suspended/unsuspended radio button had no effect. It now correctly filters results by card suspension state.
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Smart Search Tag Tree Broke on Special Characters — Tags containing apostrophes (e.g. “Parkinson’s Disease”), #, & or similar characters broke the Smart Search tag tree (thousands of JS errors). Tag values are now properly escaped so the tree renders and checkboxes work.
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Chatbot Stole Keyboard Focus During Review — The open chatbot sidebar grabbed keyboard focus on every new card, breaking Anki’s review shortcuts. Focus is no longer stolen on card change.
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Chatbot Blocked on MXBAI Decks Without Embeddings — The chatbot wrongly refused to open on notes lacking a cosine embedding, even on decks using the MXBAI search backend. The gate now respects the deck’s search backend so the chatbot opens.
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USMLE Chatbot Failed on LaTeX Output — The USMLE question generator returned a 500 error when the AI output contained LaTeX math. Parsing now handles it and produces the practice question.
Anki add-on stability
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“Add to Block Exam Subdeck” Crashed the Addon — When no notes matched the selected criteria, the webapp sent an invalid empty search string () to the add-on, causing a user-visible crash in Anki. The webapp now guards against emitting empty search strings.
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Deck Management Dialog Didn’t Refresh After Subscribing — Newly subscribed decks didn’t appear in an already-open Deck Management dialog until it was reopened. The list now refreshes so they show up.
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Deck Management Selection Lag — Selecting a deck in the Deck Management dialog caused a ~100ms UI freeze. The subdeck-tag check now runs off the main thread.
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macOS Sync/Install Sheet Opened Behind Dialog — On macOS the “AnkiHub | Sync” install sheet opened behind the Deck Management dialog, deadlocking the UI and forcing a force-quit. Dialog layering is fixed.
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Orphaned Optional Tag Group Config — Stale optional-tag-group entries lingered in the add-on config after unsubscribing or deleting a group, showing phantom entries and occasional errors. Sync now reconciles and removes them.
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Note Detail Side Panel Locks Page Scroll — Opening the note details side panel on the deck details page and then closing it left the page permanently un-scrollable. Fixed.
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Broken Documentation Links in Add-on and Webapp — Several community.ankihub.net/docs links across the add-on (Documentation menu, AnkiWeb listing, protected-fields dialog) and webapp (settings, deck deletion warning emails) were returning 404. All links have been updated to the correct URLs.
Platform, sync & reliability
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AnKing Step Deck Subscribe/Unsubscribe Hook Not Firing — A UUID vs. string type mismatch meant the hook that syncs is_step_deck to Mailjet and Intercom silently skipped every subscription and unsubscription event for the AnKing Step deck. Contact data now updates correctly.
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User Profile API N+1 Query — The GET /api/users/me endpoint was issuing up to 3 + 2S + 2C + 2M database queries (one per deck, per user). It now runs a flat 6 queries regardless of how many decks a user has, reducing load and improving response times.
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Mailing List Contact Race Condition — New users occasionally ended up with a null mailing_contact_id, breaking downstream Mailjet and Intercom sync tasks. Fixed by wrapping task dispatch in transaction.on_commit and making the manage task self-healing when the contact doesn’t yet exist.
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Django Service Memory Leak — The Gunicorn workers were accumulating memory over time due to retained transactions. Fixed by adding --max-requests and --jitter flags and tuning worker counts for the Fargate environment.
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Database Connection Leak on Fargate — Routing traffic to Fargate was doubling the expected database connection count. Root cause identified and resolved; small traffic percentages were validated before full rollout.
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Prod Celery Logs Not Reaching Datadog — Production Celery worker logs were silently dropped before reaching Datadog. Now resolved.
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Celery Beat False “Down” Alerts During Deployments — The Celery Beat monitor was firing false-positive “down” notifications on every deployment. Fixed so alerts only fire for genuine outages.
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Celery Memory & Task Failures — Long-running Celery workers weren’t being recycled (climbing memory) and a deck-media task failure was driving queue-depth alerts. Workers now recycle and the underlying task failure is fixed.
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PR Environment Migrations Not Applying — Database migrations were not being applied to PR environments, causing broken test and review environments. Fixed.
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Prod Migration Fix — A migration issue in the production environment was identified and patched.
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Production Deployment Stabilization Check Not Running — The post-deploy health check was silently skipped, removing the safety net that catches bad deploys. Now runs reliably.
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Useful Links
AnkiHub Ambassador Application Form
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!
Get support from our team https://community.ankihub.net or email us at support@ankihub.net