This morning I woke up to find many of the cards I had just reviewed and modified slightly before syncing with ankihub last night were completely reset. In general, updates to the text and extra field are great, and I would rather have them than keep whatever small changes I made. However, looking at the edits made on ankihub, there was no change made to these fields - just PANCE tag updates. A specific example is note:7560e3ac-71a2-439d-93fb-1cb53ed1dc35 - I decided I would rather reinforce the connection to gluten and celiac disease than memorize dapsone. This card was reverted to its original form, with notes from pathoma also deleted in the extra field - but neither of those fields were actually updated in ankihub.
Looking through my cards further, this has been an ongoing issue in my deck for a long time, affecting most of the edits I’ve made over the last couple months. I doubt these changes can be fixed, and I anticipate just spending a huge amount of time re-changing as many cards as I can remember the original notes to. I’m realizing many of cards that I previously knew and have only recently been struggling with had similar needless changes to the text field.
The reason I’m writing this post is to figure out why this has been happening and prevent it going forward. I’ve now protected the extra and text fields on every card I’ve unsuspended, but again I would really prefer to take legitimate updates to those fields over keeping my cards the same. Any help would be appreciated. I really like the updates feature of ankihub, but the amount of damage done to my deck by this problem is massive, and right now far outweighs any benefit I have gotten.
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The very short version is this: Ankihub functions by writing to, and updating, fields in the cards you have. If you would like to make edits to those fields, and prevent them from being overwritten by Ankihub, it will be necessary to protect those fields.
It may be worth pointing out that, in protecting a field, it will preserve your alterations but prevent any future changes (including updates) from Ankihub to that field. So there is a bit of a trade-off there. It’s not possible to both preserve your own edits to a field and to prevent Ankihub from potentially modifying that field, without protecting that field altogether.
It sounds like you’re already familiar with how to go about protecting specific fields, though I’m happy to include a tutorial and/or answer any specific questions that you might have.
Please let me know if that answers your question, and if there’s anything else I can help with.
Does this mean that every time any field is updated, the entire card is reverted to the form on ankihub? If so, I think I may have significantly misunderstood how ankihub works, I thought it was supposed to be that updates were made only on a per-field basis (so, for example, an update to only the tags would leave the “text” field alone). If that’s not the case, then I’ll probably need to just totally disable updates, since tag modifications to cards are made very frequently (which is otherwise great, if they aren’t causing other unrelated fields on my cards to be overwritten!)
It’s not necessarily the case that every time there is any update, every field is updated, but as long as a field is unprotected there is always the potential for Ankihub to write to it. If a discrepancy is detected between the Ankihub parameters and your local parameters, a natural function of Anki is to correct for discrepancies; in the case of Ankihub this can mean ensuring that both collections are ‘in agreement’ and this involves restoring, or overwriting, potential edits.
That being said, As Ahmed has noted above you can also protect tags to prevent this from happening.
Please let us know if you have any other questions. Happy to help however we can.
This helps a lot, thank you. It also explains why on closer evaluation today the reverted cards almost seemed random. I think the solution then is making adding the protection tags part of my workflow when unsuspending section. Have a good rest of your day!
