review heatmap issue

[eternal slate]

so I started using anki in around september 2024, but for some reason my review heatmap is saying that i've done reviews even in 2021-2023??

this is when i actually started though

when i click on one, it either comes up as cards from a deck i imported (core 2k/6k)

or as nothing

[glass estuary]

If you pull up the card information (ctrl + shift + i) for that card, you'll be able to see whether the imported card has any reviews associated with it. It's possible that the deck was imported with some amount of review history.

In my personal collection, I have a number of days on the built-in Calendar graph that show reviews but don't pull up any cards. These are almost certainly reviews from deleted notes:

When you delete notes, their review history is maintained in Anki. It will not be included when looking at statistics for a specific deck (as Anki has no way of knowing which deck the deleted cards belonged to), but will be included when you look at statistics for the whole collection.
(https://docs.ankiweb.net/stats.html#more)

The heatmap probably also pulls from the revlog, so will show reviews that no longer have cards associated with them.

[eternal slate]

is there any way i can fix this?

[glass estuary]

I haven't used either of the addons below, so I can't speak to how well they work.

Orphaned Review Logs

Maybe! I've never used this, but somebody did make an addon to clean up orphaned review logs. ⚠️ Back up your collection before attempting this ⚠️

Imported Deck with History

If you've verified that some of those cards came with history and you haven't studied them yet, you can clear their review history with another addon. If you have studied them, you can still clear their history, but you'll have to start their reviews from scratch.

[shadow bane]

I haven't used the Orphaned Review Logs add-on. That looks easier than the other way to do that -- export your entire collection as APKG (with scheduling), create a new profile, and import the APKG.

I have used the "Remove card history" add-on. Pro-tip -- to wipe the history completely, Reset the cards to New first, and then use the add-on to remove their history.

But if the Heatmap is your main concern, you can just tell it to ignore anything before a certain date.

[eternal slate]

thanks it worked

but DAMN it reduced my total ever study time from 82 to 68 hours 😭

[shadow bane]

Because you lost the 14 hours that were actually done by somebody else? 🙃

[eternal slate]

I presume yeah

[shadow bane]

If it's possible to use some of the above add-ons to get rid of that not-by-you review history entirely, you might still want to do that. This "ignore" only applies to Heatmap, but that history is still available to (and polluting) the rest of your Stats.