Actually yeah, that does sound better and would be more useful as some people are maybe free on days that don’t fall on the weekend (like if you’re a nurse or something).
Automation is a big QoL feature lol.
I don’t really understand vacation mode, and by extension this rest day mode, and also resets.
E.g. now I’m on vacation and my Bunpro grammar review queue grew to 400 and jpdb vocab review queue to 2-3k. I guess I could turn on vacation mode and make SRS pretend that I have 0 outstanding reviews when it actually thinks I have 3k, but why…
Isn’t it better for the tool to provide objective information of what’s worth reviewing, and for the user to decide when and how many reviews to do?
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I’d kind of like it the also as an opposite mode. My weeks are super busy, so I limit my learning to keep reviews lower throughout the week, but I have more time for sessions on the weekends, so wouldn’t mind a heavier load on certain days. So in general being able to set the amount of new reviews for each day of the week or max reviews for each day would be cool. 
I’m gonna start by saying I am kinda the same , and I don’t personally make much use of this feature. But just in case anyone was reading and worried about whether it is gonna ruin the algorithm if you use it, here goes…
I don’t get it at all for anki , but for Bunpro it won’t make much of a difference (unless you take a break for more than a couple weeks).
[edit here for clarity]: If you take a break for more than a couple of weeks, you probably will have forgotten a lot anyway, so its gonna be a whole differnt situation of releaning the stuff on low intervals haha.
There are two reasons. Both apply for review in your queue and future ones.
Firstly , with anki , if you miss a review will adjust the intervals according to how overdue, how well you rate it etc. A vacation mode would ruin anki’s algorithm, and screw up your learning. Bunpro’s system is different however. It is a simple staircase, that doesn’t take into account how ‘on time’ or ‘overdue’ you are, as the interval spacing is
The second and perhaps most important reason is that Anki’s reviews are very tailored to the time they are shown. Based on how well you did last time, the card in question is shown at a very specific time to jog your memory JUST before you forget it (in theory). A vacation mode would make this impossible, as you say it is better to let it get behind and catch up, so that the algorithm can do its thing, take this into account, and calculate the correct interval.
Bunpro has no such system. The intervals are set, and although in theory you should remember the point in question for longer each time you see it, the intervals are so arbitrary that even up to a weeks difference or so should have little to no effect on how well you remember it.
For the lower level grammar points, you are shown them either every day or multiple times a day. If you are going to take a break anyway, you will forget them if you go on vacation mode or not, and end up relearning them. Either way you will continue to see them regularly when you resume. The mature reviews are going to be several weeks , to several months, at which point since the spacing is VERY arbitrary, a couple weeks will make no difference really. Shifting your due/queue out a bit here is once again going to make little difference.
The only intervals that are going to be effected somewhat will be the one week or two week intervals, which you may well forget , but you will see them again soon and again since the interval is arbitrary you are likely to remember either way better or way worse and so the difference is not too great.
Now , since most people I know wouldn’t even use it for a couple of weeks, but a couple of mere DAYS, with how arbitrary the intervals are, this is very unlikely to effect their learning or retention in any way.
So , if vacation mode does not have any real difference - why use it?
Because it keeps the review count down.
I think its fair to say that everybody hates to work through lots of overdue reviews , all while more keep piling in. And since the intervals don’t really have anything to do with how well you remember them , perhaps it is best to actually keep the count manageable , which will keep people motivated / studying more.
Sorry I am nerdy about memory algorithms, I probably wrote too much cos I like to talk about it a lot oops.
とりとめのない事になってまうわ〜
切り上げなあかんねw
It’s just a cron calling existing API endpoints. There’s no difficulty involved.
Just wanted to let you know we had an internal discussion about this a bit back but the only two things we could come up with were:
- Freeze over weekend: Basically when you start your first review on Monday, it would trigger a mini vacation mode update and bump all your review back 2 days.
- The two downsides to this is for longer intervals, say 1 month, it will end up adding at least 8 days to the interval and depending on how many reviews you have total, it could take a couple of minutes.
- Dynamically push reviews further so none land on Sat/Sunday.
- The upside is no unfreeze wait and very very marginal change to the interval.
- At first glance this seems like the best solution but the reality is it is the same as not doing any reviews on Sat/Sun because the ones that would have become due on a weekend are just moved to the next Monday which is the result you would get by not doing reviews over the weekend.
To be honest, trying to think of a solution that achieves the result but doesn’t have large downsides kind of broke my brain when we were discussing it. If anyone has any insights or can riff off the above we are all ears!
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Just wanted to let you know that you’re based.
It certainly does sound complicated. The way I would have imagined it is that Monday essentially becomes Saturday, so if today is Wednesday and a review is scheduled for 3 days from now (Saturday) it would go to Monday. If a review is scheduled for 4 days from now (Sunday) it would go to Tuesday. It absolutely makes sense that the number of reviews during the weekdays may be higher since there are now two less days in a week. Sending all weekend reviews to Monday sounds very overwhelming and doesn’t really do anything to fix the problem.
Perhaps it’s simply not a good feature to implement. It sounds great on paper, but maybe it’s not so great in reality. I suppose an easier situation for individuals like myself would be to stop overloading on SRS and stick to a schedule that is more manageable within the confines of daily life.
That being said, how about a feature that estimates review count based on your daily goals? You could calculate based on the assigned daily goal together with the average number of correct answers in daily reviews to come up with a predicted review forecast of how many daily reviews the user could expect based on their current settings. I think you could even tuck this away inside of the deck settings page where the daily goal is set. There is already a review forecast in the dashboard but that displays your upcoming reviews. What I mean is to add some kind of message that says “hey you set your goal to X new items in a day, so based on your performance you will probably have around Y daily reviews with these settings”.
Do you think that may be a better alternative, or is that another idea that probably sounds better on paper?
The hidden, higher level reason this is requested is that many don’t feel like they’re making progress if they aren’t learning something new.
The review queue is, somewhat counterintuitively, a hindrance to learning new things. You should always clear the reviews first, thus, if you only have time to clear reviews, you never learn anything new! If you push them back, then you end up being able to learn without the “guilt” of not doing reviews.
Vacation mode or a theoretical “weekend mode” does not change the SRS reality - that reviewing after certain intervals theoretically balances time spent and retention. If you don’t review (somewhat) shortly after 4h, 8h, 24h for those first 3 reviews, on average, you’ll be less likely to remember. And that’s ok… I’m sure as hell not on a perfect schedule like that either 
!
In this way, the feature request is an attempt to solve the wrong problem. The problem isn’t that the queue is filling up on the weekend or over vacation, it’s that the queue is too big because not doing anything on the weekend or during vacation was not factored into the new item pacing.
Let the review queue build and until you can complete it without burning yourself out, just let it be big, and do what you can each day. Eventually it will be small enough to be manageable, even without weekends, and you can move back to learning new things and, eventually, find a manageable pace for that.
But to be clear, the feeling of not learning something new and being in review queue only mode is absolutely a valid one. It can be disheartening to not feel like progress is being made because the # part of those status bars isn’t going up.
Do your best to remember and internalize that each time you do a review, win or lose, you’re making progress.
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