Delay siblings — an Anki script
When reviewing a card, reschedule its siblings if they are set to appear too soon. Consider that you've got two cards on a single note, “A → B” and “B → A”, that both have an interval of several months but are due to appear days apart. If you review one of these cards today, your reviewing the sibling card tomorrow will make little sense and will just waste your time.
This script is especially useful when you are reviewing a deck that hasn't been touched for a while and thus has a lot of siblings due simultaneously.
This script displays a notification whenever it's rescheduling a card, unless you disable it, like this:
While this script only works inside the desktop version of Anki, if configured, it will also offer to reschedule siblings of cards that were changed during synchronization with AnkiWeb:
In this case, you probably want to synchronize your devices and Anki desktop daily, and it might be wise to enable the option “Bury review siblings” in Deck preferences (aka “Bury related reviews”).
How it works
This script reschedules siblings when Anki displays an answer to a card. The only thing that is taken into account is the sibling's interval (the number of days between the last review and the next one). The interval of the current card and your answer are not considered. The siblings are not rescheduled if they appear after the minimum new interval. The following table contains some minimum and maximum delays for siblings, taken from the function used.
| Interval | 1 sibling | 2 siblings |
|---|---|---|
| 0 to 1 days | 0 days | 0 days |
| 2 to 4 days | 1 days | 0 to 1 days |
| 5 to 6 days | 1 to 2 days | 1 days |
| 7 to 10 days | 2 to 3 days | 1 to 2 days |
| 12 to 14 days | 3 to 4 days | 2 to 3 days |
| 16 to 20 days | 4 to 6 days | 2 to 5 days |
| 30 days | 6 to 8 days | 4 to 5 days |
| 60 days | 10 to 13 days | 7 to 9 days |
| 90 days | 13 to 17 days | 9 to 11 days |
| 180 days | 19 to 25 days | 13 to 17 days |
| 360 days | 28 to 37 days | 19 to 24 days |
| 720 days | 40 to 52 days | 27 to 35 days |
| 1500 days | 57 to 74 days | 38 to 49 days |
| 3000 days | 78 to 101 days | 52 to 67 days |
When rescheduling siblings of cards that were changed during synchronization, the script will examine the review log to determine which cards where reviewed on other devices. It will then look at the most recently changed of these, and offer to reschedule their siblings using the same logic as the above, relative to the date of the last review.
Settings
You can find the following options in the Tools menu:
- Enable sibling delaying for this deck. If the option is greyed out, please choose a deck.
- For all decks → Don’t notify if a card is delayed by less than 2 weeks. Since only the interval of the sibling is considered, the current card or other siblings can become due close to the sibling. To prevent tooltip spam, check this option.
- For all decks → After sync, delay siblings without asking; After sync, if any siblings can be delayed, ask whether to delay them or not; Do not delay siblings after sync. You can choose one of these three options. If you choose to delay siblings after sync one way or the other, you'll be seeing a confirmation tooltip whenever any siblings get delayed after sync. There will be no tooltip or anything else if no delaying could be performed.