TV Shows that have a Season 0 or “Specials” section, it’s not usually necessary to include that content in the “Up Next” for the show. Most of that content, like Trailers and Featurettes for movies, is played when a user specifically wants it.
The request is to exclude (or provide a way for the server manager to exclude) that content specifically from the “Up Next” or “On Deck” or “Continue Watching” section by default.
The content would not be excluded from Plex itself and would still be accessible by going to the TV Show → Specials.
Currently I just ignore “Continue Watching” or in rare cases I’ll mark all of Season 0 as “played” to keep it from showing up.
As far as I know this would be applicable to all server types (windows/linux/etc) and would probably be easiest to implement on the server side itself although i suppose a feature could be included in the various plex players to do the same.
The Specials season is supposed for just that – special episodes that had aired outside the regular seasons. I know that The Movie Database isn’t overly strict when it comes to enforcing that, therefore they’re listing all kinds of DVD extras as specials.
For specials to show up in Continue Watching is actually quite important for many shows if you want to watch their episodes in proper order (e.g. Doctor Who).
On Deck follows the Originally Available date. If you don’t want Specials come up in your watch order, just remove the date metadata.
I’m not sure if regular seasons use the date (I’d assume they use episode # first), but Specials do. That’s how a Special will show up in the play queue when you’re watching the regular show. And that’s a good thing. There are plenty of examples of shows where “story critical” episodes are aired as specials.
