[Bug] in episode sorting by oldest first

Plex Media Server Desktops & Laptops
1

Hi everyone.

I’d like to report a bug in sorting of the TV shows episodes.

I have all of my specials episodes named correctly according to TheTVDB site, i.e. specials have episode numbers as in the “Episode Number” column. For example S00E01, S00E04, etc.
All of my episodes were recognized by Plex correctly and have the “Originally Available” dates correctly set.

I want the specials to be played according to the original aired date, for example I want the special episode S00E04 played after season 3. Since Plex always displays special episodes in the Specials folder and won’t play the episodes in the order I wanted, I decided to use the “Hide Seasons” advanced option for this show.

Now, all the episodes are displayed without the Seasons folders, as intended. If I set episode sorting to “Newest first” in the advanced settings of that show, the episodes will be sorted correctly (descending) according to original aired date, i.e. special episodes are placed where they chronologically belong, between the seasons.

Here is the problem - if I set episode sorting to “Oldest first” (ascending, this is what I want), the episodes are sorted by seasons not by aired date - all specials are listed first (season 0), then season 1, 2, etc. The originally available date is ignored.

To sum up - sorting by “Oldest first” doesn’t work properly.

I don’t know if this is the server problem (v1.9.4.4325) or the players’. I tested this in Plex Media Player for Windows (v3.26.2), for Linux (v3.20.6) and in Plex Web App (v3.20.7).

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2

Thanks for report. From what i can tell you are right. oldest first should be the exact opposite of newest first but it at first glance is just sorting them by season/episode numbers rather than date when by “oldest”

3

Thanks for your response. Hopefully it will be an easy fix then. Looking forward to it.

4

There have been few updates which haven’t fixed this problem. Should I have reported this via some sort of bugtracker or is it enough if I posted here?

5

It was logged in our internal github issue tracker. Sorry it is not publicly viewable. I cannot say when it will get attended to among other bugs or how easy it is to fix.

6

Hi. It’s been 11 months since I reported this problem. I’m using server version 1.13.8.5395 now and the problem still exists.

Since I originally reported this I noticed a new setting called “Episode ordering”. I have it set to “Airing order”. So we now have “Episode ordering” and “Episode sorting” settings, which is even more confusing to be honest.

Unfortunately, Plex still doesn’t sort the episodes properly. The originally available date is ignored and the episodes are sorted by seasons. The special episodes are not placed where they chronologically belong and instead are listed at the top of the list, before all other episodes.

Is there a chance that it will ever be fixed?

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