Did the repetition algorithm get tweaked recently? It seems like the pacing went from manageable to unable to keep up again. This is probably the most frustrating thing right now about the app… it’s hard to tell if it’s that a whole bunch of words came up for review or if there have been backend changes affecting the pace of review.
Either way, the pace feels like it changes suddenly and arbitrarily. For a bunch of days, reviewing 150 items a day would keep the number of items to review below 50 or in a place where I can add new words and then suddenly the number of items to review is going up by a couple hundred a day and I just keep falling further behind (unless I have more time to keep it manageable).
Also the counts seem off. I started with 500 items to review and nothing reviewed today. Got down to 389. But the daily goal shows 165 reviews. That probably makes sense if the number of items to review kept increasing while I was reviewing but it feels off.
Did you change your “retention rate” percent? That determines how fast they come back. That’s also what makes your “items to review” go up, which is independent of your daily goal.
Skritter could manage this better by using your existing “backlog” and expected backlog (based on future reps) to figure out how many new items it can add without exceeding your daily goal. Right now the defaults of “95% retention” and “20 new items/day” and “100 reviews/day” don’t balance. You would have to add words much more slowly to stay under 100 reviews/day.
I haven’t touched the retention rate. It’s been 95% for as long as I’ve been using Skritter. Yet it seems like the rate at which items to study are added varies widely. It was at a nice balanced pace and now it feels unbalanced again. I’ve said it before… it’d be cool if the variables in the algorithm were exposed in a customizable way so that each person could make it add at the rate that works best for them.
We’ve been talking about something like this, making the SRS a bit more transparent. Have you tried using manually adding only in the meantime? This would give you total control over how fast words are added.
Sorry. I wasn’t clear. I’m not talking about new words being added but how quickly the number of words due for study increases (the Due Count in the top panel of the dashboard). The rate of that due count increasing seems variable.
Ah I see what you mean, sorry for my confusion. If you hop on: https://legacy.skritter.com/study there’s an area to the right which you can click to calculate how many items will be due for the next 5 days. If you click on the calendar again, it’ll show how many words are scheduled over the next 8 weeks. If you check this out, does it seem to add up with what you’re seeing in app?
One thing I noticed immediately is that the numbers for 5 days (139,95,102,71,73) don’t match the numbers in the first days of the 8 week view (139,106,112,82,85).