stevezau/shortlist v1.9.0

on GitHub

Added

• See what changed after you update. Shortlist told you when an update was out, but once you
  had installed it, nothing said what was in it. Now the first page you open after an update shows
  the release notes for every version since you last read them. If you skipped a few, you see all of
  them. Close it and it stays closed, in every browser, until the next release. A new install
  doesn't show it.

• Star on GitHub, or buy me a coffee. The sidebar's "Support this project" link opened GitHub
  Sponsors, which only works if you have a GitHub account and a card to hand. It is now two links: a
  star, which is free and is how other Plex owners find Shortlist, and a Ko-fi coffee, which takes a
  guest checkout with card, Apple Pay, Google Pay or PayPal. GitHub Sponsors is still on the repo.

• A row can now take days off. Rows were permanent fixtures: once built, one sat on everybody's
  Home until you switched it off or deleted it. Open a row and set When it appears → Only on these
  days, and it shows on the days you pick and is hidden the rest of the time.

  Two rows can cover a week between them — one on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, another filling the
  rest — so the Home screen is not the same every night. On its off days a row is hidden, not
  deleted: it keeps its titles and comes straight back on its next day without being rebuilt, so this
  costs a few milliseconds rather than the minutes a rebuild takes on a large TV library.

  Days turn over at midnight, on the server's clock. Changing them takes effect immediately rather
  than waiting for the night. The Rows page shows Showing today or Hidden today against any
  row that has a schedule, because a row that is simply missing is indistinguishable from a broken
  one — and some Plex apps only notice the change once you leave the Home screen and come back. A
  Roku re-reads it on its own; a Shield needs the nudge. (#102)

• Requests can go through Overseerr or Jellyseerr instead of straight to Radarr and Sonarr. If
  you already run Overseerr, Jellyseerr or Seerr, add it in Settings → Connections, then set
  Where requests go to it under Requests. Overseerr then fetches each title with its own
  quality profiles and folders. Pick a Request as account and that account's own approval
  settings apply: choose one with auto-approve off, and Shortlist's requests wait in Overseerr for
  your yes. The Requests settings now say in one sentence what will happen to a title, instead of
  leaving you to work it out from three separate settings. Radarr and Sonarr stay the default, so
  nothing changes until you switch. (#110)

• Someone with an "allow only" restriction now sees their own row. Plex's allow list shows only
  the labels or ratings it names, and a Shortlist row carries neither, so a person restricted that
  way could not see their own row at all. Shortlist now adds that person's own row label to their
  allow list, and nothing else: everything the list hid stays hidden, inside the row too. Their row
  is also built only from titles their restrictions let them see, so it isn't half-empty. (#115)

• A row can set its Plex description and sort title. Two optional fields in the row editor. A
  Description is what Plex shows when someone opens the collection, and takes the same
  placeholders as the row's name. A Sort title prefix orders the row in the library's
  Collections tab (not on Home), and keeps working when the row is renamed. Leave either empty and
  Shortlist never touches that field, so a summary or sort title set in agregarr stays. (#120)

• A row can wait while its person isn't watching. A row rebuilt for someone who has watched
  nothing since it was last built just swaps in more titles from the same taste, and on a large TV
  library every rebuild is a slow Plex write. Set a hold in Settings, or per row with Hold when
  they aren't watching, and the row waits until they watch something — but only for the number
  of days you set, because the row nobody watches is the one that most needs to look different.
  Off by default. (#109)

• Get told when a run fails. Shortlist runs overnight, and a failed run was only visible to
  someone who opened the app. Turn on Send failures to a webhook in Settings and give it an
  address, and a failed run posts a message there: a Discord or Slack channel, Home Assistant, n8n,
  or anything else that accepts a webhook. A button sends a test first. The address is stored
  encrypted, because a webhook address works as a password.

• Serve Shortlist from a subpath. Set APP_BASE_PATH (for example /shortlist) to run it
  behind a reverse proxy at https://your-host/shortlist, with no prefix-stripping in the proxy.
  Thanks to @jaredledvina. (#105)

• Posters where you look at titles. Pick lists, each person's Watched tab and the Dashboard
  now show posters, read from your own Plex server, so they are the artwork your library actually
  has. The Dashboard's Most watched is a poster shelf, Recently watched groups titles under
  the day they were watched, and titles carry TMDB, IMDb and Trakt links.

• A Sharing and privacy page. It checks every account's Plex sharing live from plex.tv, rather
  than trusting what Shortlist last wrote, and names any account that can see a row it shouldn't.
  Open it from Users.

• Web search with Exa no longer needs an AI provider. Exa returns the titles its pages
  recommend, so it can now feed recommendations on its own. You can choose how hard it searches
  (Instant, Auto, Deep lite — the default — or Deep), and the hint beside each says how it
  performed when measured. Searches are cached for 7 days instead of 14, so a new release or a new
  season shows up sooner.

Changed

• The privacy sync runs every 30 minutes by default, instead of once a night. It is what hides
  everyone's rows from a Plex account you have just shared your server with. Run once a night, that
  account could browse every person's rows in the library's Collections tab for up to a day. A scheduled
  pass that finds nothing to change takes about 20 seconds, writes nothing, and is no longer listed under
  Recent; one that fails, changes something, raises a new warning, or that you caused by changing a
  setting still is. A failure is no longer reported once a later pass succeeds, and passes no longer pile up behind a
  long run. If you set your own schedule for it, yours is kept. (#119)

• The Dashboard no longer shows a row of "needs attention" chips. Each chip repeated an alert
  the notification bell already lists, so the bell is now the one place to look.

• The Dashboard's watch rate counts what people watched, not what they were shown. The old
  figure divided watched picks by every title a row had ever shown, most of which nobody will ever
  watch, so it sat under 1% whether Shortlist was working or not. It now shows, of the titles people
  watched, the share a row of theirs was showing at the time: on the maintainer's server, 99 of 535
  over 30 days, where the old figure read 71 of 10,898. It says when it is too early to judge
  instead of reporting an all-clear.

• A "watch it again" row is built from what people have finished. It used to draw from the same
  similar-titles pool as every other row, so someone with hundreds of finished films could get a row
  of two, topped up with things they had never seen. It now leads with their favourites (4 stars or
  more, when Plex ratings are on), then titles close to what they watch now, then whatever they have
  gone longest without seeing. Anything finished in the last 30 days stays out; change that with
  Skip titles finished in the last. (#114)

• The row editor is grouped around what people see. Six groups instead of eight, in the order
  you'd ask the questions: how it looks on Plex, who gets it, what goes in it, when it updates,
  where people see it, and requests. The first puts the name, description and poster together,
  beside an On Plex card showing them filled in for a sample person.

• The Requests inbox has tabs and one toolbar. Waiting, Sent and Rejected are tabs. One toolbar
  holds the movie/TV split, a search that finds a title by name or by who wanted it, filters for
  rating, votes and language, and sort. Anything narrowing the list shows as a chip you can remove.

• The run page says what a live run is doing, person by person, and "waiting for Plex" while it
  waits its turn to write. AI tokens are shown as input and output, because output costs several
  times more. Someone whose rows came out the same as last night now gets a line saying why.

• The Watched tab lists each title once. A film held in two libraries was two lines, each with
  a Block button that blocked both. It is now one line, with its libraries as tags beside the title
  and a library filter when there is more than one to choose from. (#111)

• Two rows can share a name when they build in different libraries. A Movies-only row and a
  TV-only row can now both be called "{library_name} Picked For You". (#121)

• The documentation moved to shortlistapp.dev.

Fixed

• Restrictions you set on someone in Plex were being switched off. If you had set a restriction
  on someone — excluding a content rating like R, or an allow-list of ratings or labels — Shortlist
  added its hide rule to it joined with |. Plex reads that as "either/or", not "both", so your
  restriction quietly stopped applying. With an exclude rule, that person could also see every other
  person's row; with an allow-list, they could see the whole library. Plex stored the rule exactly as
  written, so the Sharing page and the check before promotion both reported the account as hidden.
  Measured on a real server before fixing it.

  Shortlist now joins its rule with &, which Plex applies together with yours. The first privacy
  pass after you update repairs every account an earlier version wrote, and a notice names the
  accounts it fixed. Those people may notice less on the server than before: that is your original
  restriction working again. Someone with an allow-list still sees their own row: see the entry on
  "allow only" restrictions above.

  One case Shortlist can't fix for you: a label with a literal & in its name ("Kids & Family") in
  someone's restrictions. Plex returns an error for their Home screen with a restriction like that,
  so Shortlist can't add its rule to it. You'll get a notice naming the person and the label to
  rename; the Sharing page says the same, and everyone else's rows carry on as normal. (#116, #115)

• Schedules with a day of the week now run on that day, not the day after. 0 4 * * 1,4 is
  Mondays and Thursdays, but it ran on Tuesdays and Fridays: the scheduler library counts weekdays
  from Monday where cron counts from Sunday. The same slip moved every Weekly row from Sunday
  to Monday, and "mondays at 9pm" to Tuesday. Saved schedules are unchanged and simply run on the
  day they always said. If you shifted a day number to work around this, shift it back. 7 is now
  accepted as Sunday too, and a list of days now gets a description ("Every Monday and Thursday at
  4:00 AM") instead of none. A schedule that sets both a day of the month and a day of the week now
  runs when either one matches, as cron does: 0 4 1 * 1 used to run only on a 1st that fell on a
  Monday. (#123)

• A person's first row is hidden from everyone else as soon as it is built, not at the end of the run.
  Until Shortlist has written the exclusion onto every other account's share, a brand-new row could be
  seen in the library's Collections tab by the other people on your server: the row's name, which can
  say what the person watched, and the titles in it. That lasted until the privacy step at the end of
  the run, which on a large library could be an hour or more. Now someone's first row is hidden from
  every other account as soon as it is written, before any other row is. If plex.tv is failing, the
  privacy step at the end of the run still hides it, as before. People who already had rows were not
  affected. A first run, where everyone is new, makes more share-filter writes as a result — one round
  per person rather than one at the end — and the rows pause while each round is written. (#119)

• A row keeps its Plex collection when its titles change, so agregarr settings stick.
  A row that lost five or more titles in a run used to be deleted and created again, because that
  was quicker on a large TV library. The new collection had a new Plex id, and tools that remember a
  collection by its id lost what you had set on it: agregarr's custom summary and sort title were
  wiped every time the row refreshed. Shortlist now always updates the existing collection in place.

  The trade is time. Plex removes titles from a collection one at a time, and on a very large TV
  library each removal is slow, so a nightly run there can take a lot longer than before. Nothing
  changes for a row whose titles did not change. While a row is being written, the run page now says
  what it is doing: which library, and how many titles it is adding and removing, or that it is
  creating a new row. (#119)

• "Something else is reordering your shelf" no longer fires because two people watched the same
  film. A "Because you watched X" row is named after the film, so everyone who watched that film
  gets a row with the same name. The check that spots another tool fighting Shortlist for the shelf
  was counting those as one row being moved over and over — so two people sharing a film was enough
  to set it off, and the alert then pointed at Kometa or Agregarr, which had done nothing. It now
  counts each row once per pass, which is what it always meant to do. A shelf genuinely being fought
  over still raises it. (#106)

• "Something else is reordering your shelf" no longer fires when nothing else is. A row rebuilt
  during a run got a new Plex id, and the shelf-ordering pass at the end of that same run was still
  working from the delivery record read before the run started. So it did not recognise the row as
  one you had placed by hand: it swept it to the library default instead, and the next pass — the
  privacy sync minutes later, or the next run — put it back where you asked. Every rebuilt row moved
  twice per cycle, for ever, and moving the same row over and over is exactly what Shortlist treats
  as proof that another tool (Kometa, Agregarr) is fighting it for the shelf.

  Rows now land in their configured slot in the run that rebuilds them. On the maintainer's server
  one run moved 70 rows and the pass twenty seconds later moved the same 70 straight back; that is
  now zero. If you still see the alert after this, something really is reordering your shelf.
  (#106)

• Rows land where you put them on the Recommended shelf again. Plex stores each row's shelf
  position as a number and places a row by halving the gap between its neighbours. After about fifty
  moves there is no gap left, and Plex then accepts every move and applies none — in every Plex app,
  its own web app included. One library on the maintainer's server had been stuck like that for over
  a week. Shortlist now arranges the shelf by sending each row to the end in turn, the one move Plex
  always has room for, which also repairs a library that is already stuck. Other tools' rows move
  only as far as fitting Shortlist's among them requires, and keep their order relative to each
  other. Placing a row "before" another row, next to a collection that isn't on the shelf, or in a
  loop of rows that point at each other now settles too. (#106)

• A series marked watched by hand is picked up the same night. Marking a TV series watched in
  Plex could leave it out of Shortlist for up to a week, because the sync read history in pieces and
  a show's own date can be older than its episodes'. Every sync now reads each library in full. A
  series marked watched is dated from its episodes, not left at the last time it was played, and that
  date decides how strongly it steers recommendations, so a show you finish today counts as today.
  Unmarking a title takes back its pick's credit that night, not a week later. (#108)

• Renaming a row onto a name Plex refuses now works. Plex keeps a collection's name reserved
  after the collection is deleted and refuses to rename anything onto it, so a row named after its
  top title could keep the old title's name over the new title's picks while the run page showed the
  new name. Shortlist now frees a name a deleted collection left behind. Renaming from the row editor
  lists each person as renamed, waiting for the next run, or refused with the reason, instead of
  stopping at the first refusal.

• Restoring a backup actually restores it. The restore copied the backup in while the app still
  had the database open, and the restart you were told to do then wrote the old data back over it.
  A restore now waits and is applied at the next start, before anything opens the database.
  Jobs → Backups shows a waiting restore with a Cancel button, and one still waiting after a day
  is dropped.

• A nightly run cut short by a restart finishes for the people it never reached. When a container
  update restarted Shortlist part-way through a run, everyone after that point went without new rows
  — the same people each time. The next start now runs for them, listed on Runs as Resumed after a
  restart. Only a scheduled run from the last 20 hours is resumed, and never twice.

• Losing secret.key no longer destroys your saved credentials. If /config/secret.key went
  missing or was regenerated, the next start re-encrypted every saved Plex token and API key with the
  new key, overwriting the only copy the old key could read, and logged it as a success. They are now
  left untouched, so putting the original key back still works.

• A failed Support check could write your Plex token to the log file. The checks on the Support
  page removed tokens from what they showed you but not from the log line they wrote, and the log file
  always records at full detail, so a failed check put a live Plex token on disk and into any support
  bundle made after it. If you have posted a support bundle publicly, remove it or check it for
  X-Plex-Token first.

• On a server with a single Shortlist row, one bad read from Plex could delete it. Before deleting a
  row it can't match to anyone, Shortlist cross-checks the read against every other row — which was
  skipped when there was only one row on the server, the case with nothing to check against. Every
  such delete is now confirmed with a second read first.

• A row Plex had stopped accepting titles for is rebuilt. Plex occasionally breaks a collection
  so that it refuses every title added to it, and that person's row then stayed empty night after
  night. Shortlist now deletes and recreates a row in that state.

• Auto-send no longer spends its nightly slots on titles that can never be added. A show with no
  TheTVDB id, or a title whose Radarr or Sonarr isn't fully set up, took a send slot, failed, and took
  it again the next night: on one server, 25 of 40 slots in a week. Those titles now wait in the
  Requests inbox with the reason.

• Going back in the setup wizard no longer resets your row name and size. The customize step
  forgot what you had saved, and the next save — including Skip for now — wrote the defaults over
  it.

• AI token counts are right after a failed call. A failed call counted the previous call's tokens
  again, usually another person's, which inflated the run's total.

• Web search rides out a slow or busy Exa. A timeout or a server error from Exa lost that search
  outright, and on a busy run Exa also starts turning requests away; both now retry with a pause. A
  dead MDBList no longer uses up the whole lookup budget before giving up.