Give users more control over their hubs / compensate the removal of the manually managed Home screen

Feature Suggestions
1

Right now only the admin (server owner) can set recommended hubs and pin collections. He has 3 options: for his Home screen, for everyone else’s Home screen, and for everyone’s Library page.

From years of using Plex, I’ve discovered that I cannot both efficiently manage the server as an admin while also using it as a user for watching via the same account. As an admin, I have to see every library I have access to, to promptly fix matches and see if there’s something wrong with the episode mapping. Moreover, most of my users need subtitles or voiceovers, so I have to check the videos that I don’t intend to watch, often multiple times over, so it becomes a hassle to remember marking everything back unwatched. And if there’s some playback issue reported, I use my admin account to test it. In the end, I moved to a separate managed account so that I could just watch things without making my deck and history a complete mess. And I feel like many others did come to the same conclusion.

From this follows: Plex prepared a way for admins to have their own personal hub setup — admin is basically the only user who can have it set differently from everyone else on the server. But if you’re using a separate account for watching, like me - you’re out of luck.

I think that every Plex user should have the right to manage their Home/Library screens and Hubs individually, and they had it, until it was partially taken away.

Before, users could pin the Libraries they need to the sidebar, and pin only the hubs they need from them to the Home screen.
Manual management was disabled for everyone (on new clients) starting April 22. Now if a user pins a library, he is forced to see every hub for it on the home screen.
If an admin enables 5 recommended hubs (like top-rated, by genre, etc.) for some library that you had pinned, you’ll see every one of them on the Home screen, whether you need it or not. You’ll have to scroll through all of them to see anything from the next pinned library. You will basically have N-hubs-blocks for every library on your Home screen, that can’t be edited, reordered or mixed with hubs from another library. You’ll just be stuck with that, the only thing you can do is reorder the libraries and no more than that (besides removing them completely).

Also, I’ve seen a lot of users who are definitely unhappy with the new combined On Deck and Continue Watching. I feel like this should be an option cause everyone’s uses are different and there should be enough customization for some basic needs like this.

I’ll quote some examples from my message here: No More Manual Home Screen After April 22nd?!?!? - #61 by enchained

You can’t reorder individual hubs anymore.
I have one Movie and 3 different TV libraries. I’m used to my manually managed home screen. I prefer always seeing those lines first:
Continue watching
On deck
Recently added tv (combined)
Recently added movies

Now, after the update. I’m mostly ok with merged OD/CW. And the library management on the server looks interesting, so I added “Top Rated” of each library to Home.

That’s where it started to disappoint.

Now I see this:
Continue watching (combined)
Recently added TV (combined)
Top rated TV
Top rated TV
Top rated TV
Recently added Movies
Top rated Movies

First of all, as with multiple RA rows from issues reported before - there is no indication of which Top Rated row belongs to which of my 3 TV libraries. I could only guess by content and pinned sidebar order. I think this will create too much confusion for inexperienced users.

And second, a complete downgrade: since all hubs of each library are “glued” to each other now, there’s no way to mix them up in any way. If you have 5 Movies hubs for one library, and 5 TV hubs for another, you’ll either see 5 hubs of Movies first or 5 hubs of TV library first. You can’t mix them now in any way. You can’t group by category, i.e seeing Recently Added for every library and then seeing Top Rated for every library etc.

This made my desired setup completely impossible now with new hubs added. I can’t set it like that, to my current knowledge:
Continue watching
Recently added TV
Recently added Movies
Top-rated TV
etc in whichever order I desire.

The order is tied to the library order in the sidebar, so there’s no way to split or mingle so that I can get what I want.

This takes out the usefulness of the new hub management features completely for me. I had to turn it off and pretend it never happened.

Also, now server owners will be unable to pin sources they just often need to manage without being forced seeing them on the Home screen, but I think I mentioned that one before.

I separated similar issue with the new Collections feature into another feature suggestion, feel free to vote:

2

agreed, it’s a mess of things i do not want to see.

Hallelujah, will wonders never cease?
We can finally toggle off these obnoxious reviewers for good!
That took long enough!

4 Likes
3

Horrible, just ruined the PLEX experience for so many.

5 Likes
4

I’m just going to throw in my two cents because you’re talking about hubs. HUBS ARE SO SCREWED UP NOW I’M BESIDE MYSELF WITH ANGER! Who decides these stupid changes? HUBS USED TO WORK. Then the combination of the last two updates (server, client) broke the hubs AGAIN. I was able to get them back (in the old days) by resetting all and then muddling through adjustments. Even THEN the hubs were broken (e.g., CONTINUE WATCHING only showing MOVIES). BUT NOW I can’t even customize hubs. (Before I was able to customize hubs. They were broken, but I got by.) I seem to be STUCK with the STUPID HUBS that I have on my screen and I CANNOT FIX THEM! WHO THINKS OF THIS STUPID GARBAGE! ARGH! I knew a week or so ago I had finally found a semi-reasonable happy ground between what I wanted and what bugs I would tolerate. But then I added the server update and things still worked. So I figure Plex had figured out its hub problems. And so I then updated the client, which I had put off. Now it’s broken beyond my wildest fears. I don’t know why, but “the Plex team” is slowly destroying Plex. Get some new programmers or something. Yeah, I’m ranting, but I am sick of this crap. Get your act together, Plex programming team. I’m disgusted. HERE IS A SIMPLE CONCEPT: make every library “pinnable.” That seems to be the case. Then, for each library, allow us to add all the various hubs we want, e.g., CONTINUE WATCHING, RECENTLY ADDED. I really don’t care if you merge, say, CONTINUE WATCHING for both MOVIES and TV SHOWS, but I would be OK with separate entries. I WANT THE FLEXIBILITY. THIS IS THE WAY IT USED TO WORK. Why change what works well? This new mode is GARBAGE and makes me think the megalomaniac who thought it up and implemented should be “let go.” Give us back reasonable hubs -OR- give us the source code so we can fix your programming bugs/decisions once and for all. Updates bring one incompatible bug/change after another. Hell of a way to run Plex! BLAH!
P.S. One of my libraries is network evening news (NBC, CBS, ABC) and the local news at 10pm (affiliate). I simply want the latest additions to show up. THIS USED TO WORK! And for a long time, CONTINUE WATCHING no longer shows TV SHOWS. Like I said above, I can live with this, but I cannot add CONTINUE WATCHING for TV SHOWS independently. It’s all so screwed up. And I guess a rant from me cannot be complete without complaining about the ongoing (for more than a year!) CHAPTER SELECTION problem where sometimes the chapters simply scroll off the screen and disappear! Who programs this stuff, and why do they still have a job at Plex?
P.P.S. To finally say something positive (which I’d rather be doing): I noticed tonight that a bug (regression) is fixed. First, TV SHOWS now appears (again) in CONTINUE WATCHING [that disappeared a while back – regression]. Second, when I went to that TV SHOW, it showed the proper screen [hopefully won’t revert to the old regression]. So something positive happened. My HOME screen is still filled with a lot of garbage I don’t want, and I cannot delete and I cannot reorder the entries. That all used to work well – months ago. But something DID improve on this last update. Cynical comment: how long before the next bug/regression breaks it? That’s what it’s been like…one incompatible bug/regression after another.

3 Likes
5

Unfortunately Plex is moving it’s primary focus more and more away from home media server to aggregator of sponsored content, subscription streaming services and video on demand content.

The new automatic only layout is a means to bring the paid content into the users view and that’s where we should expect the future changes to take us.

As one Plex moderator has repeatedly stated, Plex has no intention of bringing back manual layout.

Maybe not yet as slick as Plex, but as opposed to Plex, Jellyfin is heading in the right direction.
https://www.jellyfin.org

3 Likes
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Don’t get me started about them ruining the experience with “Rotten Tomatoes” hating every movie I own and no toggle to shut them up.

1 Like
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I’ll check it out, enough of us do, and it will only get better… until they get as big as PLEX then turn their backs on us. That should take some time though.

2 Likes
8

Lol ironically that’s why Jellyfin was created. Emby use to be open source, then they closed the code and moved their focus to their subscription features. That pissed off a bunch of people that led to Jellyfin which is based on the open source portion of Emby.

3 Likes
9

Agree on all counts. I would also like to add something that I’m sure others are also experiencing.

First, I have over 41,000 movies in my collection (I have used Plex for many years). As such, I have multiple (81 to be exact) “categories”. Such as “Abbott & Costello”, “Alfred Hitchcock”, “Bruce Willis”, “Comedy”, “Disney”… well, you get the idea.

Since losing the ability to customize, my main screen is totally useless… and a total mess. I now have to look at:
Continue Watching
Movies & Shows on Plex (3 categories of them)
Live TV on Plex
Recent Channels
Shows on Now
Recently Added in Recorded TV (I have two HDHomeRun tuners)
Recently Added in Recorded Movies

All these BEFORE I even see my directories…
Before, I would have ONE “Recently Added” for ALL movies in ALL categories. This was easy to read. Now, I have:

Recently Added in Abbott & Costello
Recently Added in Alfred Hitchcock
Recently Added in Bruce Willis
Recently Added in Comedy

Yes, 81 of these! Please, give us back the ability to customize! Give us back the one line “Recently Added”.

And while you are making changes, give us (the admins) the ability to make the default in each directory be “Library” instead of “Recommended”.

I have used Emby (looks nice and great for kids), but too “busy” for large collections, Kodi, Stemio and MediaPortal. But, I still like Plex the best.

Please remember that most of us are using this for our personal movie and music collections (especially when the grandkids are visiting) where others can enjoy without your DVD’s being damaged!

I certainly hope to see the “friendly screens” return soon!

2 Likes
10

There is a Merge Recently Added Items checkbox in the settings. It doesn’t solve any issues I described, but it could solve one of yours.

2 Likes
11

Thank you! The most recent change divides the hubs up by default and I was losing my mind when I discovered the home screen customization was removed.

This setting brings back exactly what I had, just the recent (combined) items, in addition to on deck.

12

Agree! I’m disappointed too! This “continue watching” is unusable. I have a large library and until April 22 I was totally glad. I had have “Continue watching” and “On Deck” separately. Now I have no these options (except if I go to ‘MyServerName’ and there I see it, but all of these options are not clickable now and I can’t see these hubs)!
Please bring manual customization back, which was exist until April 22! Or at least just bring back splitted “Continue Watching” and “On Deck” options and set they clickable back for people can see these hubs again!

2 Likes
13

Absolutely. More customization is better. And make it easy to find the settings. Most people using my server weren’t even aware they could pin certain things to the sidebar and unpin what they didn’t want showing.

2 Likes
14

Do any of you know a resource for some of the more mature Plex installations?
I was wondering if it would be possible to install one of the old versions and disable update?

1 Like
15

The sorting of the hubs on the homepage currently relies on the libraries pinned in the sidebar, and the order is displayed based on the pinned order in the sidebar. Although we can customize which content to display from each library on the homepage, we cannot customize the content to be displayed on the homepage for ‘Discover’. Currently, there is too much content displayed on the homepage for Discover, much of which I do not need.

  1. I hope to be allowed to customize the hubs to be displayed on the homepage or Discover page for ‘Discover’.
  2. I hope to be allowed to customize the hub sorting on the homepage, to customize the order or display content without relying on the pinned order in the sidebar.
2 Likes
16

Let the Shared Users decide which Library Recommendations are shown on their home or recommended tab as the admin can do right now. Some people, like me, likes to see a Smart Collection on the homepage. Other people don’t like it. Let them decide what to see.

2 Likes
17

I guess your suggestion is aiming at the same as this existing thread?

If so I suggest you comment/vote in that thread in order to avoid distracting/dispersing votes.
[mod-edit: merged to consolidate votes]

1 Like
18

This seems like an easy enough feature to implement and allow users to create their own custom home screen with the collections they want. Why is this not being enabled? This was an asked from 2021.. 4 years to push such a basic function to paying customers. What do we as users require to do for plex developers to action this?

1 Like