Before I go through the effort of extracting and posting logs, I’m curious whether there’s an obvious thing I’m missing or if anybody else has had a similar problem.
I have “Weeks to consider for On Deck and Continue Watching” set to 104 weeks (~ 2 years). There is a particular show that I stopped watching in July 2016 (well over 104 weeks ago now), but new episodes are still coming out and accumulating in my Plex library. I expect that by now, the next unwatched episode (which also aired more than 104 weeks ago) would no longer be showing up in my “On Deck”, but it is.
I would like for this show to stop coming up in “On Deck”, but I want to preserve accurate watch status, so I’m not interested in implementing any hacks like marking the whole show as watched/unwatched.
I pulled my <path to plex>/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Plug-in Support/Databases/com.plexapp.plugins.library.db file, loaded it up into sqlite, and got the watch log from it, in case maybe I watched a show but preserved the old watched status (like maybe accidentally started playback within the last 104 weeks, immediately stopped it, and then reverted the watch status). But all the data shows that the last time I watched an episode of the show was 2016-07-14.
Any thoughts?
My hope is that it’s just something non-obvious that I’m missing in the configuration or my understanding of how “On Deck” works, so I don’t think my setup is likely to be relevant, but here are the high-level details:
I think what he is inferring, but did not explicitly state, is that he has a show, that he has not watched in over 104 weeks, but is still showing in the on deck.
Side note (since I clarified what the problem is, per @TeknoJunky):
I’ve been delaying on upgrading DSM because the last time I did, I suffered major data loss, and Synology support was unwilling or incompetent to help. Moreover, I’ve installed a number of things manually to get Deluge and Flexget to work, and I fear that a major version upgrade of DSM may wipe out some of that. Now that I’m on the last 32-bit version of Plex for my hardware, I have a strong motivation to upgrade, but I’ll have to do it when I have a lot of time to fix up my system again.
Sure, that would help me to pinpoint the time when something weird happened (and that’s a good idea–it may end up being diagnostically relevant), but there are some shows that I watch that have 2-year long breaks between seasons, so I like to keep “On Deck” that long, so that new episodes will come up readily when the show resumes.
Do you have any thoughts on what I might do with the information (eg, what logs to inspect), once I pinpoint the time range in which something wonky happened?
I am pretty sure that plex server will automatically surface new season premieres, of shows you have previously watched, but are past your weeks to consider limit.
For example, I have not watched simpsons in a long time, but the recent season premier is still in my on deck, until that episode date exceeds my week limit.
I even just tested, that it does drop off (and comes back) when I change the weeks setting.
I’ll take a look at those links; thanks. Sadly “reconfigure DSM and re-install any apps, including Plex” sounds like a significant-enough time investment that I might end up delaying for a while.
I don’t think it’s intellectually/conceptually painful, but I don’t relish having to sort all that out.
I’ll see what I think ends up making more sense: the approach you linked to or the typical upgrade path.
Meanwhile, I think I’d still like to figure out why this “On Deck” issue is happening. I really don’t think it’s a Plex server version problem.
That’s interesting. I wish that “On Deck” logic were documented somewhere in a very straightforward way. Sadly, it ends up being slightly unintuitive. This seems to be consistent with what you just expressed, but I guess I want something very deterministic written out! Maybe asking for pseudo-code is too much…
I’ll see if this is an okay workaround, but I also have an intellectual curiosity in why this is happening. I think it’s legitimate to have whatever “Weeks to consider” I want and for “On Deck” to behave correctly!
@ArthurZey I believe that feature (that I noted above) was documented in the release notes of PMS, at some point in the last 6 months or so.
As to your specific scenario, unfortunately I don’t see any solution or resolution to that until/unless you dig into experimenting with the weeks setting, and capturing or monitoring the logs to see what plex is doing on the back end and why.
edit; if you did not already know, you can watch the plex server log in the settings > console (at the bottom of the list).
open 2 or 3 plex web windows, change weeks setting, refresh plex web main page, monitor console log.
Well I am no expert, or dev, but if you can determine at what point weeks work as you expect, then you can start looking at what plex is doing differently when you go beyond that date.
As far as next step, I would simply post here what your findings are, and if you feel the extra effort you could consolidate your findings and email plex support directly.
Otherwise, I expect, like many bug and request threads here, it to simply fade away and either be fixed or ignored in due course.
After some further investigation on my part, it appears that I have this same issue.
The simpsons episode S21E01 aired 9/13/2018 according to the date in plex.
I have my weeks set to 3 weeks. Which was Oct 4.
It is now 4 weeks + 1 day past the air date of that episode, but it still shows.
So, it would appear that some one’s math is definitely wrong on the server side logic that determines the on deck timing.
Even setting this to 1 week or ZERO week and refreshing, it still showing on deck.
edit:
follow up, in my experimentation I had set the weeks to -2, which still did not clear my on deck (at least didn’t immediately), however at some point after the on deck did clear.
So I put my weeks back on 3, refreshed plex web, and now my on deck is back (but still incorrectly showing simpsons season premier).
To wit; changes to the ‘weeks’ setting, appear to take some time to fully update, perhaps there is some internal caching going on.
I finally did some experimentation, and I think I’m able to reproduce the essence of what you describe:
I changed the “Weeks to consider” to 1.
I went back to the “Home” screen. The offending show disappeared! (Other shows that I haven’t watched in over a week still showed up, though, even with no new episodes coming out.)
I refreshed the page. The offending show reappeared!
