It would be great to have an option in Manage Recommendations to randomize the order of the rows, rather than having them locked in their manual order.
To be clear, this would randomize the recommendation rows themselves, not the content within each collection.
This could be a toggle between:
- Manual order – the current behavior
- Randomized order – Plex periodically reshuffles the rows
The randomized option would also include a frequency setting; time-based (every X hours, daily, etc.) or event-based (for example, on every Plex Media Server restart).
It could also be useful to pin specific rows (I’m looking at you, "Recently Added”) so they always remain at the top regardless of the randomization settings, while the remaining rows are randomized below them.
But this could become even more useful with one additional setting: the number of recommendation rows to display at any given time.
We could create 100 collections and smart collections, publish all of them as recommendation rows, but choose to display only 15 at a time. Plex would randomly select 15 rows from that pool and periodically rotate them according to the chosen frequency.
So there would effectively be two levels of randomization:
- Which recommendation rows are displayed
- The order in which those rows are displayed
The combination of these two options could be particularly powerful for large libraries.
You could create as many smart collections as you want, including fairly specific or niche ones, without overcrowding Home or Recommended.
Different categories would have a chance to surface over time, making the library feel much more dynamic and encouraging discovery of content that currently remains buried.
