Don't Document When a Change Happened

[brishtibheja]

Currently, various parts of the manual tells the user when a feature was added. Particularly, in searching section. It has cluttered multiple parts of that section and is not a particularly useful information. It should be the expectation that earlier versions of the app don't have every functionality.

[dae]

The add-on ecosystem results in a significant number of users delaying upgrades. Such comments prevent them from chasing their tails, and make it clear that it's a newly-added feature, not a newly-removed one.

[brishtibheja]

I am not sure what you mean. Did you mean to say a user who has just upgraded to 23.10 may think Auto-Advance is a now deprecated feature if we don't tell him "requires 23.12+"?

[aleksejrs]

Did you mean to say a user who has just upgraded to 23.10 may think Auto-Advance is a now deprecated feature

You mentioned search syntax, not that.

[brishtibheja]

Are you suggesting an assymmetry between the two instances I mentioned? If we can set up some ground rules perhaps we can do a case by case analysis of around 69 times we mention a version number.

[aleksejrs]

You can go back and forth between versions, and your ways of using Anki will behave differently or be incompatible.

One version of Anki that I and some other users had been stuck with because of add-ons and performance was 2.1.22. Usability of subdecks has improved since then so much that if it wasn't for poor performance at review, I should have updated. But because of the issues with subdecks in 2.1.22, I prioritized cards using tags and long search queries that produced results that were too long for newer Ankis to render in reasonable time.

Search syntax is something you learn and use yourself. You can save search queries in Anki, in filtered decks, in add-ons, and in text files. They didn't take hierarchical tags into account in Anki 2.1.22, so "tag:anki" and "tag:anki::*" meant different things.

I haven't used Auto Advance myself (so I thought it was different), but I can imagine someone wanting to make cards that depend on it and to switch between 23.12+ and an older version.

[brishtibheja]

It's surprising to me that we would want to do this. From what I read here, the issue is some people might want to switch to a newer version for some tasks, and stick to earlier versions for others.

It's also not the case that this is consistently done in Anki that every new entry comes with an associated version number. How for only some things?

Manual should be made more accessible to everyone, and most people aren't doing deep dives into it to find interesting new features. They're scanning it for relevant information they need. I think the more we remove relatively unnecessary lines, the better it is.

From one AnkiDroid dev:

But "Don't make me think/read too much" should be a the goal of the manual,

Edit: I only realised this now but when you're switching between versions how is version number that important? You can simply download the latest version, or some people wouldn't want the latest but the least viable version(?).