I contacted Readwise support, but for some reason my message got bounced back to me (I sent a second one and the same thing happened).
I recently reworked my tagging system in Readwise, which involved deleting tags and renaming others. After doing this, I installed the official Readwise Obsidian plugin and hit sync. I’ve found that in addition to the tags I actually want, Readwise notes in Obsidian (whether they’re highlights notes or full captures of an article) have ghost tags attached to them - defunct tags that were either renamed or deleted in Readwise and are now no longer visible in Readwise.
Deleting the Readwise folder in Obsidian and re-syncing doesn’t fix the issue. Removing all tags from an affected article in Readwise and then re-assigning them doesn’t fix it either. The only thing that fixes it is to completely delete the affected article in Readwise and then re-save it, which makes me lose my highlights.
Since this issue is related to the Readwise Obsidian plugin and how tags from Readwise get pulled into Obsidian, I figured it would be worth a shot to see whether anyone here might know why this is happening (even though the issue does ultimately seem to be on Readwise’s end, because fully deleting an article from Readwise corrects the issue).
I’m also a bit confused about what the current limitations of the Readwise plugin are. The Documentation seems to be out of date - it says changes to existing highlights (like deleting a highlight or expanding it) won’t sync unless the article is deleted from Obsidian and re-synced, but this doesn’t seem to be true. I ran a test with one article and found that the plugin was able to successfully detect when an existing highlight changed without me needing to delete the Readwise folder in Obsidian and re-sync.
I see nothing in the Documentation about detecting article deletions or changes to tags though. So far, when I add or remove a tag in Readwise this change isn’t reflected in Obsidian after syncing the plugin. Articles I delete from Readwise also remain in Obsidian after syncing the plugin. I have this hope that my settings just aren’t configured properly, but understand that this is probably a genuine limitation of the plugin. I just want to verify this.
I suppose my last question is how you personally use this plugin given its shortcomings with detecting changes to articles. How is this plugin a part of your workflow and what workarounds do you use to make up for the shortcomings?