Yeah, the 20 item limit is on the server side, and is dependent on the next PMS update.
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The user I was responding to has 1 partially watched movie, not 6 items.
I understand that may be a 1 off situation.
Thanks for the reply DaveâŠ
Iâve seen this argument used by Plex before⊠I seem to remember it was when Plex wanted to ditch the HTPC.
OK, so there was an experimental feature that was posted on the forums, which seemed to be alive for a few weeks, and had this many interactionsâŠ
So Iâm not entirely sure that could have been considered a large sample size.
And indeed, I appreciate that this thread started as a result of a mistake whereby the feature hit the WebâŠ
But ever since this topic was started, which was Dec 16th 2020, it certainly appears that âmostâ people on this thread at least, dislike this feature.
In theory, the only real way to resolve the discrepancy is to provide the option to toggle the combined feature on / off.
Thanks for the confirmation Dave, and perhaps one way to help dial down the heat with this one would be to see if there is any way to ask the powers that be, to make a decision and then an announcement, as the heat in here is still pretty high! 
Like you, I have been following this discussion since the beginning and would also like to chime in, if only to make sure I understand how things are working.
I will note up front that my use of Plex is relatively simple. I am the only one who views content on my clients (I do have remote users with their own clients, but I think their use is similar to mine). Since Iâm the only user, I donât experience the same thing as some of you who have multiple family members all sharing the same client and building up a large number of partially watched items. I tend to watch things all the way through, although I occasionally will pause something I donât care for. I know I can wait for that never-to-be-finished item to age off the CW hub, or I can mark the item played or unplayed to force it off. With the new CW, I like that I can now remove that item directly from the CW hub. So +1 for that feature.
Because I donât have lots of partially watched items, my CW hub has always been fairly short. I donât really care about screen real estate, so having this hub take up part of the screen didnât bother me. So for me, merging CW & OD just to save screen real estate was a âmeh.â
I had always thought of OD as showing the next unwatched episode of only those shows (not movies) that I had been watching (whether I finished episodes or not). So if I last watched E02 of a show, OD would display E03 as the next episode in the show to be watched. Or if I finished a season, OD would display the first episode of the next season (assuming there is one). I never thought of OD as a ârecommendationâ hub, as in some random episode or show a Plex algorithm thinks I should watch. Rather, just the ânext batterâ from the same team in the same game (to borrow someoneâs earlier baseball analogy).
So I am fine merging CW & OD because I think of OD as another type of a more general âcontinue watchingâ scenario: i.e., continue watching something that is partially watched, whether that something is a movie or a show season. Merging CW & OD feels like a benefit to me because I think of it as a simplification of how I considered CW & OD when they were separate (even if saving screen real estate alone is not important). +1 for me.
I definitely see why having the merged CW/OD hub limited to 6 items was problematic. Because of my viewing habits, I probably wouldnât ever get to the newer limit of 20. But if Plex is committed to changing these limits to respect those that are specified in the server settings, does this make the merged CW/OD less of an issue for folks (and obviously it has to be working properly)?
I can also see the benefit of letting users choose whether to merge CW & OD or keep them separate as they once were. Itâs hard to tell from the replies from Plex folks in this thread and others whether the decision to merge was for deeper reasons than what some here are supposing (e.g., arbitrary), so I, for one, would like to hear more. Is letting the user choose âold wayâ or ânew wayâ more complicated than we realize? Or does it cause downstream problems in the roadmap? Knowing a bit more might help those who think this was an arbitrary decision and should be technically easy to address.
Thanks for the constructive dialogue.
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Indeed, I agree that being able to remove an item from CW is a good addition.
Reading through how you use the home screen, I can certainly understand how the merging of CW and OD would be of benefit to you, and others who may use it in a similar way, which I think is actually similar to other users in this topic who have also given positive feedback to the feature.
And I think this is actually key here⊠To be open to how other users use this product 
Perhaps the biggest thing that @Plex could take away from this, might be to do more research for a little longer when considering making changes to such fundamental areas of the product.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. One thing I was trying to understand better is whether the merged hub is truly and fundamentally problematic even when the hub size limitation is addressed. In other words, if the merged hub had not been mistakenly limited to 6 items (now 20, which I realize is still arbitrary and not enough for some), would this be such a hot item?
I spent a large part of my career running software product management organizations, and I keenly understand the importance of getting good customer feedback when making important product decisions (and almost anything in the UI is gonna be important!). Like all of us, Iâm on the outside looking in and have no way of knowing just how thorough a process this was for the Plex team. I do recognize that this thread represents a pretty small sample size, but that said, it doesnât mean itâs right to ignore the feedback.
As well (as I suggested earlier), I have no way of knowing how important Plex thinks this change is for their product, irrespective of user feedback. I know that may sound blasphemous, purely from a user perspective, but having been on the inside of many other major software product decisions, sometimes long-term strategy trumps short-term grumbling (yes, even if thereâs a risk of losing a few customers). Again, I have no way of knowing whether or not there are strategic decisions in play here. If not, then I would certainly vote for a feature that gives users the ability to choose their preference of CW/OD styles.
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Obviously I can only speak for myself but I have seen similar comments, it would not fix the problem. I see the two as different types of lists and combining them makes no sense at all.
OD shows the next episode of the TV shows you are currently watching.
CW, continue watching an episode or movie that you have started but not completed.
I didnât even use these rows until a few months ago. I would just go to my TV library and find the show I wanted to watch.
I convinced my wife it was easier to start from On Deck. Two months later Plex said I was wrong. 
While there was the experimental option available in the forums a few weeks back, thatâs only one element of our testing and research. We work with external folks (folks from here, Reddit, other places), a mix of new and long time users, plus our own internal employees (all of whom are Plex users, and have been for a long time). Feedback from all these people is considered, and then we act on some of it. Some will take effect before the release itself, and others will happen afterwards. There is always room for improvement, but we spend a decent amount of time testing new ideas before getting them out
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How many people was it tested with?
You gave the number 147 in this thread
I suppose to suggest we were insignificant
If you want to play the numbers game itâs only fair to supply both sides
Iâm not really sure what the numerical translation of âmanyâ is
If you tested it with 20,000 people and 15,000 liked it Iâm sure most of us would stop complaining
If the majority wants the changes I can live with that.
I suspect thatâs not the case
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Iâm not going to give exact numbers (we never do), but we received both positive and negative feedback in our testing, and we looked at where the feedback was, and looked to improve things. In general, many people do not voice something unless they dislike something, or REALLY like something. As we mentioned before, it took a little bit of adjustment, but we found that most people preferred it after a few weeks of use. Personally, I was not a fan of it at first, but I was won over by seeing more items on the home screen in general, and the ability for the new hub to incorporate not only items from my own server, but from any source I had pinned, including servers shared with me, and our VOD content.
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Thatâs great and I really do like it but why not have options in the first place? One size fits all rarely works.
Big parts of this thread could have been avoided, easily.
If the main part of the argument for making the changes is the number of people who liked it, I would suggest that people will remain skeptical about those numbers and the process by which the numbers were gathered if they remain secret
Especially if you feel like your wants and needs arenât being represented
If it sounds like thereâs some kind of danger associated with that type of transparency and thatâs going to make people wonder why
If youâve ever heard the term âSunlight (or transparency) is the best disinfectantâ it applies here
Itâs a bit like a defense attorney telling the jury that his client didnât commit the murder because he has a rock solid alibi
But this mystery person that can provide the alibi wonât come forward and testify or give an interview
Maybe the guy is innocent but no one is going to believe him
There is also other work that will build on this as well, but not giving exact numbers is not exactly new. Not many places would even have given as much information as I have here 
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How can I find out what I was watching, on deck is gone and continue watch lists likes 6 things not the 20+ that were in my on deck. I am using a fire tv and very confused as my wife and I canât find an way to see what shows we have been watching but not completed of the past months.
If you look in the library view with all your shows in it you can see a little orange block on the cover for the show with a number in it. The number is the amount of shows left in that series you havenât watched yet
If thereâs no orange block with a number it means youâve watched all the episodes you have for that show
Click on shows that have odd numbers like 7. That means Youâve probably already watched some
Once you click on it scroll down and click the poster for the season and that will open up the individual episodes. The ones you already watched should have a solid yellow line all the way across the bottom of the picture.
Pick the first one with no yellow line and you should pick up where you left off
The real answer is that there is no easy way
You have to dig through your library like a homeless guy in a Plex trash can and hope you find something good
You should be seeing 20 items in the Continue Watching hub, on the new Automatic Home Screen. If youâre using a manually managed Home Screen, I suggest you migrate over to the new one. Can you please confirm which version of the app youâre using?
If he was using a manually managed home screen the continue watching row disappears completely. He wouldnât even see 6 shows
Thatâs how it was on my Fire TV a week ago unless thatâs changed.
I understand what youâre saying, but Iâm still trying to understand the use case a bit better. Are you saying that combining those two types of information/play status makes it confusing and harder to find what you want to watch next (i.e., a movie/episode you were in the middle of vs. a ânext-upâ episode)? And if so, is that because you tend to have many (say, dozens or more) items in each category, so when combining them into one hub itâs too much to filter through easily?
It almost sounds like you and your wife care more about OD than CW, but I could be interpreting this incorrectly. I also find OD useful to tee up the show episodes I probably want to watch next. And as I mentioned in my original post, I tend not to have many (if any) things in the âpartially playedâ bucket anyway, so the combination of OD with CW didnât faze me. But if you tend to have more partially watched items, which you really do want to be reminded of, I can see why keeping those separate from the OD items makes sense.
Conversely, if you tend to have lots of partially watched items that you donât want to be continually reminded of (i.e., you didnât really need the old CW hub), then I can also see why combining those unnecessary items with the more important OD items is a problem.
Itâs interesting to think through the different use casesâŠ
Also worth noting that as was mentioned in the original post here, if you had a partially watched episode, it appeared in BOTH Continue Watching and On Deck
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I think you said earlier that this somewhat arbitrary number of â20â is being changed to respect the server side settings for CW and OD in an upcoming release. Do I remember that correctly?
And for further clarification, those settings today specify the number of weeks to be considered for âcontinue watching,â and the number of items to be considered for âon deck.â Assuming those two settings remain as is, what are the implications of both types of items being combined into a single hub? Are they additive (or perhaps more accurately, treated independently of each other), so no matter how many partially watched items I have, and no matter how many on-deck items I have, I will see a combined hub consisting of all the items that meet either of the server criteria?
Example: say my server settings are 20 weeks for CW and 25 items for OD. If I have 50 partially watched items during that 20 week period, and 30 on-deck items, do I see 75 total items in the combined hub?
Or if I donât care about CW at all and specify 0 weeks on the server, do I see only the 25 OD items in the combined hub?
