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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:

notification example

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:

delay after sync dialog example

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.

Interval1 sibling2 siblings
0 to 1 days0 days0 days
2 to 4 days1 days0 to 1 days
5 to 6 days1 to 2 days1 days
7 to 10 days2 to 3 days1 to 2 days
12 to 14 days3 to 4 days2 to 3 days
16 to 20 days4 to 6 days2 to 5 days
30 days6 to 8 days4 to 5 days
60 days10 to 13 days7 to 9 days
90 days13 to 17 days9 to 11 days
180 days19 to 25 days13 to 17 days
360 days28 to 37 days19 to 24 days
720 days40 to 52 days27 to 35 days
1500 days57 to 74 days38 to 49 days
3000 days78 to 101 days52 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: