I wanted to create a collection with recently added unwatched TV Shows (not episodes) with some custom filters on top of it, and to pin it to Home of every user.
Only the admin can create a collection, so I went to a TV Shows library and created one, with one of the filters being “Show Plays is 0”. It correctly shows only unplayed titles for the admin, but if I switch to any other shared user, it just stays the same - it’s basically static, and other users can see something they’ve already watched there. And it doesn’t make much sense, it feels like a bug, or maybe the whole Smart Collection feature wasn’t thought out that much. Cause it feels that filters like Show rating, Show Plays, Show Last Played, Unplayed Episodes, Episode Plays, Episode Last Played, Episode Uplayed, Episode In Progress etc can ONLY be useful to 1 user per server - the admin.
The Collections are visible to every user, but not every user needs to see a collection based on what/how often the admin watched something. I was really excited for the whole Smart Collection feature, but I’m getting disappointed again and again with it - just cause I prefer to watch via a managed user from my server, I can’t enjoy any of those great personalization features at all, at least for now.
The latest server version went out of beta (1.23.6.4881), and after the update I noticed that my managed user has an option to Edit Filters of that collection. I went to edit it in the hope it’ll apply filters for this user instead and I will finally be able to embrace the promised personalization… and it just gives an error on updating the filters. Perhaps it still isn’t intended for anyone besides the admin, and the UI just slipped through the cracks?
I hope I just missed some existing options or something, cause a lot of those smart filters are personal and the option to make any Collection filter either admin- or user-dependent would help with a lot of use-cases (users could see their unwatched titles with top critics score, while also being able to see a collection of titles the admin himself rated with 5 stars).
UPD: looks like I’m not the only one thinking about that, and it isn’t currently possible: https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/ooakdi/smart_collection_logic_for_unplayed/. Sadly, Smart Playlists advice from there doesn’t fit the use case - you can’t pin them, and you can’t create one visible to all the users.
