Currently we have to manually switch to vacation mode if we don’t have time to study daily. If you for whatever reason forget to switch to vacation mode you’ll return to a very large number of reviews.
Is it possible to have a mode that never accumulates and simply lets you return to the “next” lesson even after prolonged period of time?
I always forget to switch to vacation mode i feel this 
I keep telling myself don’t switch to vacation mode because you will study tomorrow anyway and then not study for 3 months.
One one hand maybe a if you’re not there for a few days it automatically switches to vacation mode thing might be cool. But weirdly enough I don’t mind them accumulating because then the expert items will have had their time to come back and be potentially mastered ^^
I just wish that it would give me the items that i know better (like that already are in expert) first so i can send a bunch of items to far in the future before getting confronted with characters that i completely forgot, that will come back every day. But then again you’d potentially have a day in the future where hundreds of items come back to you within a week 
Honestly I am curious if anyone ever remembers. Passing a day or two is usually unintentional
I think this would be something cool to consider too 
I’ve also thought about having some review optimizations would be welcomed to make reviews faster.
There was a customization thread a little bit back that detailed other customizations we could add to the reviews:
To make sure I’m understanding correctly, if the next day you had 200 reviews, you would want it to be frozen at that state even if another ~20 days pass?
yes. It should always be the same number (200) regardless if I am away 24 hours or over 9000 hours away. (I am taking 200 as an example)
Perhaps it would be worthwhile to reprogram the software to not release a new “batch” every 24hours that accumulates automatically. But instead have a “manual” release button.
This way lazy people like me who sometimes forget to do daily training can release only 1 batch of 200 reviews + 20 new words. But super dilligitent people can do multiple trainings per days and release 10x200 reviews + 10x20 new words.
What would it mean to release a review? Reviews are scheduled after you last interact with a card. So if you don’t do reviews for a week, you’re just accumulating all the cards that became due in that week. I suppose they could make it so:
TBH though this kinda sounds like a UIUX-only change rather than actual behavior. It’s the same thing as having 2000 reviews and just mentally saying “I’m only going to do 200 today and be happy with that”.
One suggestion I have instead is, if you miss X days of reviews, allow cards to skip SRS ranks if you successfully answer them. So if you skip an entire week, even the cards that were only on the 1day interval get upgraded to the 2 week interval. The sub 1-week interval cards contribute a huge amount to the review pile.
How do you allow cards to skip SRS rank?
Right now this functionality isn’t implemented. Right now the SRS system only takes into account the time it was initially scheduled for at review time in order to compute when it should be scheduled next. This means that even if one hasn’t seen a card in e.g., months, if it was initially scheduled to show up after a 2-day period months ago, the next interval it will be scheduled for would only be e.g., 4 days. In reality, it should be much higher, since by answering the questions correctly after such a long period of time the user has already demonstrated that they know this card quite well!
Anki has a good documentation article about this general philosophy: Due times after a break - Frequently Asked Questions
We are actually working on an initial beta implementation of a better SRS algorithm (derived from SM-2 which most SRS systems use) over these next months, which should solve this problem, in addition to the broader problem of excess review accumulation. 
While we’re working on a better SRS algorithm to help with review loads, we just added the review limit which caps the reviews you’re interested in doing each day.
It makes sense that the variance of one’s review schedule could make reviewing more difficult – and as they accumulate, more intimidating to tackle 
so helpfully this helps with getting through reviews!
What does the “Enable New SRS Algorithm” setting change at a high level? I just noticed that in the settings and didn’t see any information on it other than in this forum post.
It alters the SRS stage intervals and adds a couple of other changes to make it so reviews don’t accumulate as much. You can read more in the announcement