Make ‘respecting the movement of cards between decks’ optional

[ELLIOTTCABLE]

The documentation states that, if a card is in a different deck when a CrowdAnki deck is imported, that it will be moved in Anki as well.

This should be optional: decks should be able to be, optionally, ’virtual‘ — that is, a “Foo” deck with 24 cards is imported, but then those cards are moved by the user into another “Major” deck with hundreds of other cards, then re-importing “Foo” should simply update those notes/cards where they already exist: in the “Major” deck.

The issue here is scalability: Anki (as mentioned in the manual) doesn't handle large numbers of decks, well. It's pretty standard practice to distribute a subset of information in a “shared deck”, but usually, one merges many of those into a single deck per subject (or writes their own cards about that subject, that don't belong in the original shared deck, or … you get the idea.) Thus, it makes sense for (most) CrowdAnki decks to be ‘virtual’ like that: import them, merge them into your own subject-specific decks, and then merge upstream changes as they're offered.

(Really the only situation where one wants ‘concrete’ decks, ones that precisely match the CrowdAnki representation, and follow said representation when it's imported if it's changed, is when one is using CrowdAnki to backup/record one's entire collection — and that's currently not well-supported in other ways, so …)

Just some thoughts! (=

[Stvad]

Maybe I'm missing something, but why do you need to merge the decks if you can have a hierarchy of them?

[ELLIOTTCABLE]

@Stvad cf. https://apps.ankiweb.net/docs/manual.html#using-decks-appropriately — as mentioned above, the literal manual says “don't do this, it makes Anki slow, Anki isn't optimised to do this”

[ohare93]

People do not use CrowdAnki to merge decks but to merge notes. Using this type of system allows us to manage and maintain the content of the notes. Everything else is user specific: which deck the notes are in, the settings for that deck, etc. I too have many different types of cards all in the same deck that I would love to store together and not have to manually move back each time.

As I would also love this tickbox, and I have just had some experience extending the configuration options in the latest PR, I'd be happy to take a crack at this. However the sooner someone points me in the general direction of "here is where the cards are moved decks" the quicker I'll get around to actually doing it 😉

[Stvad]

Also discussed more in #8 with a fork there proposing a prototype for basic way to make this configurable (dayjaby@39c9666)

[ohare93]

I have submitted PR (#69) which fixes this issue 👍 @ELLIOTTCABLE

[ohare93]

(pinging @dayjaby too, as he complained about this in Issue #8)

[ohare93]

Issue is now fixed 👍 there is now an option in the config settings to not move notes on import (see PR #69)