No probs.
For the moment “rediscover” is taking the place of what I used “on deck” for.
For another data point, running a browser server side, CW on TV Shows very briefly shows many entries on page refresh, then truncates the list to 6…
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Huh… I like that idea! I may drop my weeks for Continue Watching time limit down further now and just make sure that one is moved near the top of the library specific page for “what were we watching 5 months ago?” use. Useful for home screen for some folks probably too.
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A problem here is working off feedback from experimental features. That’s a seriously fatal assumption, and you should not be using that model as a testbed to determine what course Plex takes. It’s foolish, plain and simple.
I’m clearly in the “this change is awful and stupid and ruins Plex” camp. I never see experimental features, and as such you never hear a vote from me on how awful they are. Many here seem to be of a similar mindset. So, recap and reinforce: Relying on feedback from experimental features is not at all, whatsoever, a good representation of the desires of the majority of your userbase.
Hubs do not work consistently across platforms. On Web I can find an “on deck” for podcasts and pin that to my home screen. Cool. Firestick? Podcasts → Manages Hubs … blank. Nothing. Zero.
Before coming up with a freakin’ major change that has such a negative impact as this, how about making the UI work across platforms, and maybe steer towards consistency in the UI across platforms?
Getting back to this current wreckage: It’s broke as hell. Web, Home → Continue Watching only has one partially viewed film. If I go to TV, CW there has a paltry 6 shows listed. Hovering over “Continue Watching” shows it’s on home screen, but no TV shows are reflected there, only the one film.
Remove from Home. Go to TV, CW, hover and click the + to add to Home. Go to Home, and CW is re-added at the bottom, and still has only the one film.
So, CW on Home doesn’t reflect what is suggested in the TV library.
From my perspective: I have lost On Deck, and CW doesn’t do what appears to be intended. Home no longer shows me where I was at with TV, and therefore no longer indicates to me the next show in a series.
As with others, my On Deck was large and used to keep track of old favorites I like to jump back to when time allows. That’s gone. All. Gone.
Here’s what Plex needs to do:
- Put it back how it was before
- Don’t do this again
- No, really!
- Don’t even attempt to make a change like this again.
- Stop using “experimental” feedback as a way to gauge user interest, as it does not reflect the average consumer by a few million lightyears. How many average consumers run beta code on their phone, or their desktop/laptop? How many more run a stable release branches?
Un-fudge this cluster, make us happy. I recently invested in a NAS to park media and host Plex, on top of my recently acquired Plex Pass. Now, this one solitary change, this foolish, unnecessary change, makes all that investment wasted.
I don’t expect you to read every comment in this thread, but if I at all have your attention still I’ll reiterate what I said before:
How this new change “works” is how I could see Plex being 5 years ago, and what we just lost, with On Deck, as being the evolution that Plex refined itself in to. This change is literally such a giant leap backwards it boggles the mind that anyone thought this was good idea that would be of a benefit to anyone.
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Apparently adding one “if/then” decision tree fork is insanely difficult for Plex. They thought this change was a good idea, so that should give us an idea of what we’re working with here.
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Or, roll back to how it was, and leave it alone. People are beyond unimpressed here, but have crossed over to actively unhappy, agitated, and even angry.
Why do you want to do this to your users? Does this improve to the experience for the majority of the people here?
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Then why are Collections such a PITA?
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This is just bad. I give my own server priority, and I like segmenting out other servers and their material from my own.
Not all servers are created equal, and you’re now forcing us to treat them as such. Now we see that you allow one server’s settings to take priority over ours, while compacting them all down and forcing them to be displayed as one.
Rather than suggesting I tell an admin how to run their server for my convenience (a message I would not want to receive from someone else, few people would!) how about you honor and respect the settings we have?
And how about rolling back this change and never doing it again?
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I do offer full refunds of the $0 fee they paid to sign up. 
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I like the combined list. It’s a benefit to me and improves my experience.
As someone interested in the development of the software I kept an eye on the upcoming features presented in these forums and voiced my support for this one and I have been looking forward to this particular change. Even if it wasn’t as smoothly implemented as I might have preferred they are fixing the only implementation complaint I had about the server setting control for number of items.
Just presenting an alternative voice here because I don’t want vehement complaints to remove a feature I like just because people generally voice complaints about changes more than they voice acceptance of changes.
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Don’t worry. Plex likes it too and it’s here to stay - for a few years 'cause that’s how long it took for Plex to go BACK to the unified list they had, before they sprung Continue Watching on everyone - in a move that wasn’t well received then either.
Plex is like Food Lion.
Every time I go in there it’s all different. I can’t find the Peanut Butter, but just think of all those things I don’t need and in the cart looking for it.
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I would voice support if the changes worked as they stated it would
I really don’t like the combined On Deck and Continued Watching.
I watch a lot of TV and Movies, and it’s all through Plex. Some of it is just by myself, some of it is with my wife, some of it is with my kids, either both together or each one separated. It’s not unusual to be in the middle of 2 or 3 movies, and 2 TV shows depending on who I was watching what with AND watch 2 or 3 different shows in between.
Before continue watching had all my continue watching up front. Even if my daughter and I (who watch specific movies during her every-other-month medical procedures) went weeks to months between watching a specific thing, it remembered where it was an it was FRONT AND CENTER. Now, it can be hard to find it because there’s a whole ton of other shows that show up because I watched one episode of it, and a new one came out. The top row should be everything I’ve hit play on and have not finished yet, and the next row can be whatever On Deck feature you want to implement.
In my opinion, there should be a way to see JUST the specific video files that you are in the middle of at the top so they’re easy to find and finish.
I’d take just putting the in progress stuff first, then the rest of On Deck after if that’s easier to implement. But right now it’s not usable to find things that were started a couple of weeks ago but not finished yet.
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And isn’t as good or useful as two separate sections.
They are two different things. one is a list of things I have manually started doing something with (hit the play button)
The other is stuff I might want to watch based on other things I’ve watched.
They’re not the same thing and shouldn’t be in the same list.
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Maybe I’m confused here but hasn’t the continue watching always been incorporated into the on deck prior to this update? Plex says they combined the two when really all they did is eliminate the option to have the continue watching separated into a different row on the home screen.
On deck was for shows you have not started to watch yet.
Continue watching was for shows you started to watch then had to stop.
You don’t need me and a thousand other Plex users to explain that those are two different categories of progress in your watch history
You knew that and that’s why those two things had separated rows to begin with
I upgraded my fire tv app a few weeks ago that gave me the combined on deck and continue watching but it only had a limit of 10 shows for both. That was beyond useless for my needs so i reverted back to an older version.
That was an unintended Plex mistake as i understand from another thread and that number will be increased.
But how do mistakes like that happen if these change you refer to as upgrades have been thoroughly tested and rated by enough users to implement them in a mandated update for the masses?
On a side note using phrases like “we are removing the ability to manage your home screen manually” causes people to go ballistic and it’s hard for them to get past any further explanation of what’s going on. Which is why the employees here have to keep repeating themselves in order to explain it.
If I understand correctly the changes to my home screen on my player will now be controlled from the server side which is more along the lines of how it should be described.
I also have no desire to control what other people see on my server. I give them access to what libraries I want and they can decide how they view it. It’s really not my concern.
It appears as though Plex is making changes like this to suit their needs rather than their users.
For paying customers this is unacceptable.
We paid to have things set up the way we want, not how you want
These changes are being implemented to reduce operating costs rather than satisfy the customer.
You upset customers, frustrate employees, and steer potential customers away from buying memberships because they come here and see all of the complaints.
Who wins?
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I like the idea of a universal On Deck from all servers. That actually makes a lot of sense. I even like the idea of a universal Continue Watching. Right now it IS annoying to have to navigate to another server to continue watching a movie I started and stopped for whatever reason.
What I don’t like is mixing In Progress items with On Deck items. As has been said many times, they are NOT the same thing. I shouldn’t have to search through a long line of items to find my half-finished Jurassic Park to continue just because I have multiple people in family using a shared account on the living room TV.
From @DaveBinM 's explanation (and I do thank him for explaining how it works), I envision family room TV account that is shared by 4 or 5 members of the household getting the short end of the stick.
For those of you actually using the new combined list, If I have the max items set to, say 20, on this new combined hub, how does Plex determine whether or not and where to display partially watched items? Hypothetically, if everyone in a family of 5 has a few partially watched items, does that mean there’s no room for “next up” content? Or will some partially watched items disappear from the hub in favor of displaying the next unplayed episode of a show?
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They answered my exact question on this quite a bit further up the thread…
Essentially, in the next server version 1.23 the On Deck\Continue Watching setting will be honored so that imposed limit won’t be a thing anymore. So if you set 40 items and 20 weeks then that’s what will show up on the Home Screen for YOUR server content in the OD\CW row. If you set 100 items and 3 years then that’s what will show up.
If you have multiple servers connected to your client then you’ll get the aggregated content (40 of my items and 100 of yours for a 140 long list for example).
You also have the option now to remove items from the list manually which is account based so will sync across devices.
They’ve also mentioned looking at giving the combo of OD\CW as an option rather than full change but don’t know how much to expect that one. Though I might be getting that mixed up with the per library vs combined library “Recently Added” lines on the Home Screen.
There have been a number of server side controls enabled for the automated Home Screen as well that you can control from the Library settings.
Really they might need to summarize the current\future status of this into a new thread with a FAQ because stuff is getting lost in this super long one since digging through 700+ posts to see previous questions and answers is just a bit too much.
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Yeah, we noticed that too, and it was fixed internally yesterday. Will be in the 1.23 release of PMS 
Part of the problem I have is, at first glance, I’m not sure what are intentional changes and what are bugs. Changes that look like mistakes are not normally good.
I have to come to the forum to find out. Sometimes it’s still not clear.
Combining RA and CW doesn’t seem like a logical decision. I don’t see what the goal is. That’s never really been explained.
These are two different groups. At least make it optional.
@DaveBinM - What is the problem Plex was trying to solve by combining the two lists?
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I can’t speak for DaveBinM but I vaguely remember reading on another thread it was to cut down on empty space on the home screen. That didn’t make much sense to me because one to three items in the continue watching takes up a row but if nothing is in it, the whole row disappears and the on deck would move all the way to the top.
If they are worried about having too much empty space they solved that problem by putting a recently added row for every library
I suppose the only way there would be any empty space is if the on deck row only had 1 or 2 shows in it which I have to imagine would be very unusual. (currently have 112)
The only other thing i can remember reading is that items in the continue watching were also contained in the on deck, but if redundancy was bothering people couldn’t you disable the continue watching before?
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